Chinese, US hackers' cyber battle goes global

A cyber-war between American and Chinese hackers, in which hundreds of official websites have been defaced, is to escalate today as hackers from other countries join in.

Chinese hacker Jia En Zhu said that today, the Chinese national holiday of Qingnian Jie or Youth Day, would be the "big day" in the unofficial war during which Chinese Government sites have been defaced with anti-Chinese slogans and racist jokes and US sites scrawled with messages like "Beat down the imperialism of America."

Jia En Zhu said: "We are already inside the US Government's computers, and we can hurt them if we choose to. What we are doing is not a war, though. This is just the way hackers have fun."

Whether war or fun, the joust has spread beyond China and the US as hackers in other countries align with one side or the other.

Pro-US hackers are now supported by hackers from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, India, Brazil, Argentina and Malaysia.

Pro-China hackers are receiving support from others in Korea, Indonesia and Japan.

Mike Assante, of Vigilinx, a US risk assessment firm, said Government officials and security firms would be monitoring the network to block e-mailed viruses and attacks.

The FBI-led National Infrastructure Protection Centre said hackers had been particularly active over the past two days and warned Governments and businesses of the "very significant increase in attempts to exploit known weaknesses" in Unix networks.

Attempted exploitations of weaknesses or probes, usually the precursor of an attack, "number in the millions, and the activity is ongoing."

Attacks are usually known as denial-of-service, which crashes computer networks by flooding them with useless traffic.

A teenager using such tactics crippled the Yahoo!, eBay, and Amazon.com sites during attacks in February last year.

Chinese hackers claim to have hit the US House of Representatives with a successful denial-of-service attack, and to have hacked into the networks of the US Department of the Interior's National Business Centre, the US Geological Survey and Pacific Bell Internet Services.

UUNet, a big internet service provider, the United Press International news agency and the White House Historical Association have all acknowledged that Chinese hackers have defaced their websites.

US hackers have defaced the websites of the provincial governments of Yichun, Xiajun and Beijing, the Deng Xiaoping police force, the Tsinghua and Xinjiang Universities, and Samsung's and Daewoo Telecom's Korean sites.

Statistics posted on the Chinese Hacker Union's website say Chinese hackers are hitting US sites at random, striking Government, corporate, and small e-commerce sites.

US hackers seem to be focused on defacing Government sites.

The non-profit security site www.attrition.org, which carries details of defaced web pages, lists dozens of sites that have been cracked by US and Chinese hackers in the past two days.

Some of the Chinese sites now carry anti-Chinese political messages about China and Tibet.

Others carry obscenity-laden slogans and jokes.

The cyber-war took off after the collision of a US spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet over the South China Sea in early April, sparking a stand-off between the two powers.

American hackers were waiting to see if the Chinese escalate their attacks said a hacker known as "pr0phet," who is thought to have defaced more Chinese websites than any other individual.

"If they do, I'll say this - it will get way ugly for their servers."