Seattle-Area Website for Girls Club Hacked by Angry Muslims and Nobody Cares (edited)

On February 8 I posted about the hacking of Danish and Western websites by Muslim cyber-terrorists over the cartoon controversy. Last night I received an e-mail from a knowledgeable CT Blog fan in the Seattle area about the hacking of a recreational website, and I posted the text of that e-mail. This afternoon, that fan sent me a request to change what I posted this morning in order to clarify the situation after a day of investigation, with important new information:

The Muslim Web Hack Attacks have reached Seattle, attacking (of all things) a girls' scooter club. The website has been restored by the web hosting company, Flux Services of Bothell, Washington. Flux Services graciously provided the webpage hacked by "nEt^DeViL" for CT's archives.

One Seattle TV station, KING-TV, and its partner Northwest Cable News, both owned by Belo Corporation, featured a story on the web hack on their Sunday news programs. Due to an error in the domain registry entry (the responsibility of domain owners), KING-TV erroneously reported that the website was hosted by Drizzle, a highly-reputable Seattle Internet service provider (ISP) and web-hosting company with more than a decade of experience. In fact, the hacked website is and was hosted by Flux Services. KING-TV also reported that the FBI was notified about the hack but had not responded to the website owners. There is no independent confirmation of FBI action or inaction.

The list of Islamist web hacks worldwide since the Cartoons hit the fan is now into the tens of thousands. There is no coordinated response from law enforcement. There seems to be a lack of appreciation to the gravity of the matter. These are not just hacks for their own sake, these are probing attacks similar to skirmishing in conventional warfare.

As previously noted, Zone-H catalogs thousands of Islamist web attacks. Zone-H isn't an IT security group, a computer security foundation or a White Hat society. It is mainly a group of European hackers, some aged out from their Black Hat days. Several comments from their contributors, especially in Italy are rather ominous. One of Zone-H staff, Simona Sapienza, wrote an extensive paper of Islamic terror financing in Europe (Word file).

US law enforcement response to attacks crippling critical infrastructure has recently been good. Criminal indictments were handed down just last week on "botnet" attacks which crashed the computer systems at Northwest Hospital and Medical Center last January, 2005.

The outstanding question is law enforcement response to Islamist "hack-tivists" defacing or otherwise compromising non-critical websites. Again, considered in isolation, defacing a women's motorcycle club website for a day or two is an aggravation but not a threat to society. Considered in aggregate, however, defacing and compromising thousands of webpages is a dangerous pattern, a sure sign of probes preliminary to a coordinated attack of potentially massive proportions.

You might ask, "Why Seattle?" Maybe because a local paper published "the cartoons."