The online world has entered a new phase. At first it was a combination playground, library and meeting house for scientists and soldiers, an inviolate virtual world. Companies later tried to turn it into a mall. Now, it's becoming a borderless . . .
The online world has entered a new phase. At first it was a combination playground, library and meeting house for scientists and soldiers, an inviolate virtual world. Companies later tried to turn it into a mall. Now, it's becoming a borderless battlefield. In recent weeks, the Middle East conflict spilled over into the Internet as Web sites throughout the region have been altered with messages advocating online attacks against other sites, both Israeli and pro-Palestinian -- in some cases providing the software that make such attacks possible.

This isn't the first conflict to see hacker activity; similar incidents have occurred in the Balkans, Russia, Mexico and China. ``It's become almost standard practice in any political conflict to see that occur,'' said Eugene Spafford, a computer security expert who runs the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security at Purdue University

And like the Internet itself, this cyberwarfare simply ignores national boundaries. Many attacks on Israeli sites have originated in Pakistan, as did an attack earlier this month against the Web site for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a lobbying group. The site was defaced with anti-Israeli commentary. But this exploit took cyberwar a step further: The attacker stole some 3,500 e-mail addresses and 700 credit card numbers, sent anti-Israeli diatribes to the addresses and published the credit card data on the Internet.

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