Crackers Set Sights on Iraq
by James Glave
3:00 a.m. 30.Dec.98.PST
A global group of 24 hackers and crackers spent Monday night probing,
mapping, and preparing to attack computer networks owned by the government
of Iraq.
Quoting at one point from the Declaration of Independence, Steve Stakton,
a member of the seven-year-old Legions of the Underground group, called
for a concerted one-week cracking campaign against Iraq.
"Iraq has treated human rights issues as poorly as China has," said
Stakton in a meeting of the group that was held Monday night on Internet
Relay Chat. "We need to carry out what the government won't, and can't,
do."
Stakton, 24, quoted from the group's mission statement: "We are ready to
commence, and take [part] in electronic warfare if requested."
Iraq has no connection to the public Internet, though Iraq Net, an
official government homepage, is based in New York. Group members claim to
be targeting an older, nonpublic network inside Iraqi borders that they
say runs on a vintage protocol called X.25.
"We are targeting them via terminal dialup," said Stakton in an interview
conducted with group members on Tuesday over IRC, a global text-based chat
network where identities can easily be forged.
Group members said they were probing sequential network numbers within an
older network owned by MCI, which they believed were assigned to Iraq.
They described the system as "a gateway that handles systems that have no
local chain of numbers."
"It would effectively isolate them from the world if we took out the
X.25," added a 19-year-old member based in Minnesota who goes by the name
"lothos."