Geert Lovink: One more anti-NATO hacking story

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Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 12:10:26 -0400
From: Ivo Skoric <ivo@reporters.net> (by way of Geert Lovink)
Subject: One more anti-NATO hacking 
story

The latest on Russian "anti-NATO" hacking assaults, as reported by
Gazeta.Ru (Web-based daily newspaper, published in Moscow). 

A couple of hours ago another 30+ US and Canada sites were hacked in
protest, this time against NATO deployment in Kosovo. Needless to say,
none of the sites had anything to do with NATO, apart from being
physically located in North America. Adolescent Russian cyber-vandals just
use the pseudo-patriotic hysteria as a pretext for using trivial hacker
exploits against foreign sites with known security gaps. 

Russian authorities, quite keen on prosecuting domestic hacking, can not
act on this sort of "anti-NATO" computer crime, because overseas victims
never complain (Gazeta.Ru has obtained this explanation in an official
response from the Russian compcrime authorities). 

Full list of sites hacked (together with technical data and AltaVista
queries for contents) is available here:
http://gazeta.ru/daynews/16-06-1999/15hackers.htm The article itself is in
Russian, but the URL list is in pretty international Latin charset.
Translation could be made available on demand. 

WBR - Dr. Anton Nossik,
Editor-In-Chief,
Gazeta.Ru Daily
Moscow, Russian Federation
http://gazeta.ru/