While the concept of cyber-terrorism has existed for some time, the war in Iraq has really brought it to the fore, with hackers on both sides disrupting opposition Web sites.
To compound the problems, anti-virus vendors have warned that virus writers may use the conflict as a means to spread their insidious designs.
The Internet activists fall roughly into three categories: patriotic Americans, Islamic extremists and peace activists who back neither side in the Iraq conflict but are against the war.
Reuters reports that hackers who impersonated an Al-Jazeera employee managed to trick an Internet addressing company, Network Solutions, into making technical changes that effectively turned over temporary control of the network`s Arabic and English Web sites.
The hackers - calling themselves the Freedom Cyber Force Militia - initially hijacked Internet traffic destined for Al-Jazeera`s English Web site and redirected it to a different Web page depicting a red, white and blue US map with the message: "God bless our troops."
Al-Jazeera`s site in Arabic was later attacked, with Web surfers at one point being redirected to a pornography site.
Since then, waves of spam have flooded the Al-Jazeera sites to such an extent that they have been totally disrupted for three days, with viewers unable to gain access.
Meanwhile, the same report suggests that a suspected extremist Islamic group hacked into an Internet bulletin board in the US town of Homer in Alaska, turning it into an al-Qaeda propaganda site that called for attacks on the US in response to the war in Iraq.
Also entering the cyber war are the peace activists. Sites such as the Electrohippie Collective - which dubs its site the Free Range Activism Web site - have been encouraging anti-war attacks, offering downloadable programs that can run "cyber sit-ins" from the user`s computer.
These encouragements appear to have been successful, with federal, state and local government sites across the US having been hit with anti-war slogans and rude messages directed at President George Bush.
In Spain, www.noalaguerra.org, which means "no to war", has organised a spam attack on the official site of the ruling Popular Party, whose leader, Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, supports the war.
Apart from standard hacking activities, four worms and viruses have been identified that spread as attachments to e-mails and seek to exploit interest in the Iraq war, says F-Secure, a Finnish anti-virus software company.
One of the worms, called Prune, has a subject line which reads: "US Government Material - Iraq Crisis", and is apparently aimed at people with friends or relatives in the military who want to get information, tricking them into activating the worm, which then tries to erase operating system files.
Another anti-virus vendor, Sophos Asia, has warned that responding to online polls asking them to vote for or against the US-led war on Iraq could be a hook to launch a new virus.
"Online polls focusing on the war could also be dangerous, as a clever virus-writer may disguise a virus file as an application to vote on the Iraq war, and with all the interest, there is a high chance that people will click on it," says Charles Cousins, MD of Sophos Asia.
He also warned of another worm, known as Ganda, which will try to entice users to open it by claiming to contain pictures of Iraq taken by US spy satellites, or screensavers mocking Bush.
"Iraq and other less developed countries also have highly skilled programmers capable of creating complex viruses, and they will probably copy 'successful models` like the Yaha, an e-mail virus used by Indian virus-writers to attack Pakistani Web sites," he says.
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