Will al Qaeda respond to the death of Osama bin Laden with serious cyberattacks? The short answer is no. Despite an active interest in cyberattacks, al Qaeda has not managed any successful assaults other than some posting of propaganda, ATM milking and credit-card fraud. This is mainly because its key computer experts have been captured  or killed. Here we reconstruct the group’s efforts to tamper with Western technology:

July 1999: The first cyberconflict between Hamas and Israel inspires al Qaeda’s leaders, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

June 2002: American officials warn that hackers associated with al Qaeda have been accessing hacker tools and probing emergency phone systems, nuclear power facilities, water systems and gas pipelines.

November 2002: Imam Samudra, an advocate of cyberattacks who organized the Bali nightclub bombing, is arrested in Indonesia (and eventually executed).

March 2003: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is captured in Pakistan. He is currently being held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

April 2004: Younis Tsouli begins hacking into Web sites to post al Qaeda propaganda. He later distributes a written “Seminar on Hacking Websites” and goes on to perpetrate the most successful al Qaeda–linked cyberattacks to date.

October 2005: Tsouli is arrested in London.

August 2008: One of the last al Qaeda leaders expert in computers, Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, is reported at large in Kenya, but all al Qaeda efforts to mount cyberattacks have died down.

May 2011: U.S. forces find and kill Osama bin Laden in Abbottobad, Pakistan. 

Editor's note: This story was printed with the title, "Al Qaeda and the Internet."

3 Comments

1. 1. scientific earthling 01:18 AM 7/13/11

   Al Qaeda is a religious organisation. For religion to exist, we need people who can not & will not think. The more extreme religions have learned to curtail thinking by demeaning people why ask Why or How. This does not mean that they don't comprehend using technology. They lack the ability to create it or understand its workings.
   
   A doctor uses technology to treat the most severely ill patients, often successfully; but does not usually understand the chemistry or physics behind the tools he/she uses. A text of anatomy can tell him where things are and how they work, the minute the doctor asks the question Why, he/she is in the field of science, medicine has no answers, nor should it expected to. Medicine is an applied technology based on science.
   
   Like others is science I hate segregation of various aspects of science into Botany, Zoology, Physics & Chemistry. My personal interests flow across the branches, that is why I like the basic degree courses and hate PhD studies which restrict one to an extremely small sub-sect at the expense of the wonder of the whole.
   
   To get back to the subject, Al Qaeda may have technicians who know how to use the technology of internet communications, but they would never be capable of understanding the science that underlies it to be able to engage in cyber-warfare. Who ever wrote the program that takes control of a PLC and disables supervisory hosts from reporting input signals outside specifications; resulting in centrifuges spinning beyond safe mechanical limits and exploding, knew exactly how the program worked at the machine code level. No that was not an Al Qaeda operative, religious indoctrination does not allow this level of rational thinking.

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2. 2. jgrosay 12:56 PM 7/13/11

   Spike Lee's movie "Do the right thing" is a good approach, the more showing you're hit by an attack, the lesser the possibility of somebody looking for a worst scenario. Anyway, we all know that any bad situation is susceptible of worsening.

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3. 3. Steven Cassidy in reply to scientific earthling 11:55 AM 7/20/11

   I think you may have missed the root of the problem. While this isn't a forum for debating religion, your post exhibits a level of close-mindedness and inability to consider things outside a limited, empirical level of understanding. This manner of thinking is central to organizations like al queda which focus on a single-minded, uninformed approach to faith. The single-minded, uniformed secular mindset is equally as ignorant and unrealistic.

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