Trojans Attack Al Jazeera

Computer security experts mi2g say Al Jazeera “is running its computer network like a ‘match-box’ organisation in comparison to its Western peer group”:

Al-Jazeera, the at times controversial Arab news satellite channel, has had its computer network compromised by Trojans with built-in mail relay engines since the Arab weekend began on Friday 14th January. The mi2g Intelligence Unit has since then received reports and evidence from reliable sources that 100s of identical emails every hour have been sent from specific Al-Jazeera email accounts that have brought down normal business services at targeted internet accounts in the West as they have been overwhelmed by the Denial of Service (DoS) attacks.

Despite making contact with the individual email accounts at Al-Jazeera that appear to have been unknowingly originating the DoS attacks, no official response has been received to date.

….Given that Al-Jazeera is running corporate security policies for its network which are lagging behind the West by between six to eight years, it appears relatively easy to bring down their computer network at present or overwhelm their computing facilities. If certain political powers find Al-Jazeera to be a pain in their backside, and there are some who have gone on record to say that they do, there are clear ways as a result of observing the recent DoS attacks that can be utilised to quieten them easily and anonymously. If those ways have not been used to date and are now being tried and tested out, is this because Al-Jazeera is being targeted to serve a particular purpose, where its satellite network or website www.aljazeera.net may be commandeered in the near future to push out very specific messages with an agenda different from the journalists and editors who work at that news agency?

“A news agency’s computer network is its printing press,” said DK Matai, Executive Chairman, mi2g. “It would be unthinkable to have confidence in a news agency whose printing press or TV broadcasting service could be compromised because then one just would not know whether the news story one was reading or listening to was true or injected by a malicious third party.”