According to Reuters, an unknown gang of cyber-terrorists attacked the website of Qatari TV channel Al-Jazeera on Tuesday.
The Department of Monitoring of the Kavkaz Center English Service which uses information from Al-Jazeera for its news reports, recorded the attack on the website of Al-Jazeera on Tuesday at 09:50 pm Stockholm time.
The Department of Monitoring reported that users who had opened the Al-Jazeera website at the address http://www.aljazeera.com/, were redirected to the address http://www.aljazeera.net/, which was actually hacked.
After a couple of minutes, the website switched backed into http://www.aljazeera.com/. This address was not hacked.
During the attack, the KC Monitoring Department reports, it was only possible to access to the homepage of Al-Jazeera. Against the background of a shaded true page of the English website of the Qatari TV channel, there was an inscription in Arabic, which, according to Reuters, contained the words that the channel supports "armed terrorist group and spreading lies and fabricated news".
Reuters continues:
"Al Jazeera took the lead in covering the uprisings across the Arab world, and Qatar, one of the Sunni-led states in the region, publicly backed the predominantly Sunni rebel movement in Syria against Assad's Alawite-led government.
Opposition activists on Twitter blamed the hacking on Assad loyalists.
Al Jazeera officials were not immediately available for comment.
The hacking attack, claimed by a group calling itself "al-Rashedon" (according to the KC Monitoring Department, it was the only inscription in Latin letters in the Arabic text - KC), is the latest in a wave of cyber attacks on news agencies and energy companies, carried out by hostile governments, militant groups or private "hacktivists" to make political points".
A specialized computer website PC World explains the technical aspects of the hacker attack:
"Babar Mustafa, a senior software engineer with Al Jazeera, wrote on Twitter that "DNS [Domain Name System] poisoning issues are being resolved by our provider".
ISPs often provide DNS services to their customers. Tampering with DNS settings can be particularly harmful, since users can be redirected to a fake website even though a correct domain name has been typed ( the KC Monitoring Department did not type the name, and went to the Al-Jazeera over a link - KC) into a web browser. The type of attack is known as DNS "poisoning."
For its part, Washington Post wrote on Wednesday morning
"In a statement, the channel said that some of its external servers were compromised. While the company resolved the disruptions, it said, "some users may continue to experience issues for a while longer".
It is to be recalled that starting June 6, 2012, independent international Islamic news agency Kavkaz Center has been subjected to continuous DDoS attack from the hostile Russian government, through its cyber-terrorist group of the KGB (FSB). Therefore, not all our mirrors are still operating.
In its cyber-terrorist DDoS attack against Kavkaz Center, the KGB uses computers worldwide infected with a virus from so-called "Kaspersky Anti-Virus".
According to experts, the Assad regime has no technical means or smart hackers to attack such a powerful website as that of Al-Jazeera. Therefore the attack was carried out by Russian friends of the Assad regime from the KGB cyber terrorist department.
Another reason to believe that the attack on the Al-Jazeera was carried out exactly by Russian cyber terrorists is the fact that shortly before the DDoS attacks on the KC, there were discussions on Russian websites of taking out actions against foreign "extremist" portals which cannot be reached directly by KGB violence, namely by replacing their DNS.
The Kavkaz Center wrote about that at that time on its Russian website. According to the KGB, there are no ways to counter such attacks if they are a bit mastered. It goes without saying that this type of attack is too complicated for the Assad's Alawite regime in Syria.
With this in mind, we believe that it was the KGB cyber terrorist group which tested its ability to suppress the truth by "DNS poisoning" on Tuesday night.
Department of Monitoring
Kavkaz Center
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