Seven years ago, there were only a dozen websites associated with terrorist groups; today there are over 4,000.
What's more unsettling is that American computer users may assist in this growth phase for Al Qaeda. The appeal of the Internet for those engaged in any sort of crime is twofold. First, it's possible to conduct business in near complete anonymity provided you can divert pursuers by routing your activity through neutral networks and computers to cover your tracks. And second, most people running those networks and using those PCs are so completely naive about this technology that for the sophisticated criminal, hijacking the hardware is child's play.
The average American computer user comprehends only a minor fraction of what his or her machine can do. Word processing, Web surfing, and burning the odd CD hardly exhaust a computer's capabilities, and consumers who shell out $2,000 every couple of years to purchase a new computer for these purposes are a little like the bourgeois urbanites who use a Viking range to boil water and reheat takeout.
But a computer is connected to the outside world—and that makes the naive owner of a networked PC vulnerable. A few years ago a computer-savvy New York identity theft ring stole the credit histories of more than 30,000 people, and used them to empty bank accounts, take out false loans, and run up credit card bills.
In 2003 over a thousand people had them hijacked by a group of hackers representing porn sites, who secretly used the computers as portals through which to transmit material onto the Web. The programs didn't harm the computers, and wouldn't show up unless users were looking for them. "Here people are sort of involved in the porno business and don't even know it," said Richard M. Smith, the computer researcher who first noticed the problem. Another security analyst believed the ring could be traced to the Mafia-connected computer underground in Russia—but couldn't say for sure.
Terrorists have become experts at identifying unguarded server space from which to upload material. Jihad videos were recently discovered on the servers of George Washington University and the Arkansas State Highway and Transportation Department.
Some of the more sophisticated terrorist sites migrate from one server to another, often several times a day, in order to evade the authorities. "Reverse proxy servers" allow a user to cloak his identity behind a "front" computer, by transmitting material through that computer onto the Internet while making it appear that the front computer is in fact the server.
It's not only civilians who are vulnerable to the menaces of the Web . . . (read article)
