A lot happened while you were sleeping last night, and much of it won’t be reported in the news today. Silently but with great precision, hackers around the world have been attacking various websites — it’s the new frontier of politics. And unless we understand the many layers of the web, we’ll be caught up in it.

Paint me a picture, you ask. Here goes: The Eastern Railway website was hacked into last month, its scroll changed to read “Cyber war has been declared on Indian cyberspace by Whackerz-Pakistan”, apparently in revenge for Indian violation of Pakistani air space. An Israeli news website, Debka, blamed cyber terrorism for its site shutting down following the Gaza attacks. And Jane’s Intelligence Group (UK) just reported that Al Qaeda has been using online gaming websites to launder money to finance its activities.

Online crimes come in various sizes. There are some against persons, such as child pornography. There are some against property — corporate espionage, banking fraud, defacing websites. Hackers; those who “destroy or delete or alter any information residing in a computer resource, or diminish its value or utility, or affect it injuriously”, according to the Indian Information Technology Act, 2000, have also taken to social networking sites with great enthusiasm. Group discussions tend to turn rowdy, and in the end, resemble a drunken bar fight. Facebook has been caught up in a virtual war. A group formed to collect 500,000 online signatures in support of Palestine was hacked into by the Jewish Internet Defence Force, which closed the group, signing off with ‘Israel forever’. The Palestinian hackers, not to be outdone, reacted by taking back their group and posting a cartoon of Calvin urinating on the Israeli flag.

... contd.