Newswise — While law enforcement officers monitor airports and U.S. embassy sites for possible retaliatory attacks as a result of Osama Bin Laden’s death, University of Alabama at Birmingham’s nationally renowned cyber-sleuth is doing the same thing, but online.
Since the news of Bin Laden’s death, Gary Warner, director of research in computer forensics, has been reviewing hacker chat rooms and looking for signs of particular threats or hostile response. “We've reviewed thousands of messages, looking for news of attacks, and to capture the sentiment of the Arabic-language hacker community,” Warner said.
So far, he’s found heavy activity among three groups: Jihadi groups, those without a “cyber” component; pro-Palestinian groups who historically are not linked to Al Qaeda; and Arabic-language hacker groups.
Among the Jihad group, Warner said he is seeing “mostly very pious, very religious expressions of sorrow and mourning; prayers for bin Laden and his friends and family.” The pro-Palestinian groups, who were already planning for a hacker attack in homage of the May 15 anniversary of their first intifada (rebellion), are talking about that. Arabic-language hacker sites are posting messages declaring allegiance to bin Laden's cause and poetry about how “the golden lion has left us and there is a black place in our hearts” and promises to “pick up the banner of Jihad.”
“Things are a bit confused right now by the fact that there has been very active planning in the pro-Palestinian hacker movement for events surrounding the anniversary of the first intifada,” Warner said. “Many Israeli websites are being attacked, but this activity began before the announcement, and is likely to continue to increase leading up to May 15, a day that some are declaring ‘the 3rd Intifada.’”
“We'll continue to monitor things and see if we see any changes in that direction,” Warner said.
Currently, the only risk to the average consumer is traditional scammers trying to infect your computer by inviting you to click on things related to Bin Laden's death. When you get those, don't click on them, he said.
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