- The American Academy of Diplomacy was hacked yesterday at 18:15 GMT while the US, UK and Spanish leaders met at the Azores summit. It still remains vandalised at the time of this alert 14 hours later [it's up now].
US Secretary of State Colin Powell had received the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Award for Excellence in Diplomacy from the Academy on 11th December 2002. The message plastered by the hacker group RSF "Rooting Sabotage Forced" at the Academy's website was the phrase "NO WAR" repeated over 30 times. Other messages left behind over the weekend have been protests about the way the US and UK are handling the Israel-Palestinian situation.
As the war with Iraq looms ever closer and diplomacy appears to have all but failed, the number of digital attacks on American and British business and government targets remain at an all time high. For twelve trailing months, the number of independently verifiable digital attacks on the US stand at 48,155 and for the UK they stand at 7,607 according to the mi2g SIPS database. In comparison, the number of attacks recorded over the same period for France was 3,082.
"On the eve of an imminent war with Iraq led by the US and UK, we are advising all American and British businesses to be extra vigilant in terms of blended asymmetric attacks on their offices or outlets anywhere in the world. Such blended attacks could include synchronised physical and/or digital attacks," said DK Matai, Chairman of mi2g.
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