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Posted on 09/16/2001 6:48:38 PM PDT by avg_freeper

EXCLUSIVE: Crackers Prepare Retaliation for Tuesday's Terrorist Attack

Massive attack against routers, computer systems planned against Middle East countries suspected of harboring terrorists.
By Shane Peterson - September 2001

NEW YORK -- While the federal government tracks down suspects for questioning in Tuesday's attack against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, cracker groups and individual crackers said on Friday that they are plotting their own counterattack. The group is calling itself the Dispatchers, and, in a letter posted to the Web on Sept. 12, the group said it has already disabled ISPs in Palestine and is targeting ISPs in Afghanistan with the explicit goal of destroying them.

The Dispatchers, now approximately 300 strong, said they will also go after Pakistan, Iraq and several other Middle Eastern countries.

"Right now, we're trying to get as many computers as possible," said Dawgyg, a cracker from World of Hell. "You remember the Mafiaboy thing? We're basically going to do [the same thing] to their routers and destroy their Internet connections throughout the Middle East. We're not going to deface their pages this time. We're going to down their Internet."

The cracker groups said they are planning a coordinated attack against Internet infrastructure in targeted countries and other critical information systems.

"I've been working, and there's been groups of four, five and six people working on different projects," said Hackah Jak, a 21-year-old cracker from Hackweiser and Project China. "I know of one group that's recently targeted two countries and found the systems that handle their money. It's happening as we speak."

The intensity of the attack should be sufficient to cripple connectivity in targeted countries, Dawgyg said, given the numbers of machines that the crackers have compromised to use in the attack. He said he's got approximately 1,100 machines under his control to use in the attack.

"We have the potential and the power, if we push hard enough, to knock an entire country that we target offline for over a week," Hackah Jak said, adding that the crackers started communicating with each other Tuesday afternoon to develop a game plan on the progression of the attack. "We had a basic idea of how we should go about this from our previous shot at Project China back in April and May when we targeted China."

It's a large-scale attack, with crackers in the UK, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, China, Australia, Canada, India, Egypt, Germany, Holland, Denmark and the United States all taking part in the attack.

The Dispatchers aren't worried about law enforcement taking a dim view of their actions.

"I personally know some law upholders -- I don't want to say where they work or their names -- but I've spoken with them, and they said it's not illegal because it's out of the United States and that they don't have too much of a problem with it," said Hackah Jak. "It's not like we're targeting systems in United States and using them for the attack. My main focus is using their systems to attack each other and disable them."

Though crackers may not be thought of in patriotic terms, Dawgyg said that he and his fellow crackers are enthusiastic about the attack.

"The way most of us see it; most of the hackers are anywhere from 14 years old to 18 years old," he said. "This is the only way we can do anything about [Tuesday's attack]. I read an article the other day about Osama bin Laden using encryption methods developed by the United States and Internet access to communicate to his different groups around the world. If we can prevent him from doing that, he won't be able to contact them, therefore, it will make it harder for him to coordinate such attacks like Tuesday's."

Theoretically, if the crackers could get an IP address or an IP range that Bin Laden uses, Hackah Jak said, they could sniff the packets, decrypt them and send the information to the FBI.

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