Yevgeny Kaspersky, of Kaspersky Labs fame, has raised concerns of a major attack on the internet today. Kaspersky has been widely quoted as saying that there would be a major online attack against Israeli sites today. "Arabic and Hebrew language websites contained an announcement of an 'electronic jihad' against Israel, to start on 26th August 2004".
True? Quite possibly. However, after this news was widely circulated around the web, Kaspersky went on to clarify his comments. He remarked that the true possibility of the threat was 'low', but added that Kaspersky Labs would be raising their online thread level.
He also commented (and raised a very valid point) that if not today, it could be tomorrow that we see an attack. He noted that the many insecurities in the internet's structure and popular Operating systems meant that it was only a matter of time before online terrorists added 'the internet' to their arsenal of weapons.
Although such a major attack has yet to take place on the internet, a few have come close. Of note, an attack on Akamai, WWW content distributor/cache, did serious damage due to the number of sites hosted with them. Equally damaging was an attack in October 2002 on the Root servers of the internet, that manage DNS. For more information on this kind of attack, read here for an extensive interview with Dave Dittrich.
View: Info from Russian News Agency Novosti | Clarification @ Viruslist.com
