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Cyber War!

 
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Maurice Ali



Joined: 14 Nov 2003
Posts: 7655
Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada

PostPosted: Mon May 24, 2004 11:59 am    Post subject: Cyber War! Reply with quote

Cyber War!


By Maurice Ali, Journalist




Our founder goes into battle! Geek vs Geek.....hehehehe.....


There was an unseen war taking place at fortressoffreedom.com; a war that has only recently abated. This was the war to keep our venue and organization fulfilling it's objectives to host the news from the "little man".


History And Prelude To The Battle

Fortressoffreedom.com arose from a desire of a soldier to post his photos from his tour in Iraq for us to see; however, when posting on one of the free hosting services, we found the photos "disappearing" almost as soon as they were posted..... The soldier then requested help from us to host the photos, I hosted them on my dial-up web space at the time. But it bothered me that this person was incapable of expressing himself on the net, presumably one of the most open venues for self-expression. So I decided to create fortressoffreedom.com and host stories and reports that other venues may turn away. We play no favorites, have no agenda save that of creating an open venue for the free exchange of ideas and experiences. One of the first archives made was those soldier's uncensored photos from Iraq. There the photos stayed, relatively unseen for about six months.....


Someone Takes Notice And Makes Themselves Heard


Or little organization grows and we "play" reporter going to events in our area when time permits. I was always amazed at how thankful people were that we were reporting their demonstration, I did not know how much the media can validate a struggle..... In any event we decided to produce a newspaper and suddenly got some peculiar IP addresses on our hosting server. Our first sign that we were being watched came when some embarrassing allegations against presidential hopeful John Kerry (having an affair with a young women) were reported on an internet news agency at the Drudgerreport.com). I received a very strange IP address that turned out to be the U.S. Department Of Justice.....why us? It appeared that they had already archived us as a news reporting web site and looked around to see if there was any connection (or evidence) related to Drudgerreport.com. One of thousands most likely.....still, this was exciting! Then there came some visits from the U.S. military. These were military intelligence archiving robots (followed by a secondary "human" verifier) that most likely responded to my story entitled "War Cry". Fair enough as I learned that these "key" phrases were common place and most were "false alarms" - like ours was. I actually "thumbed my nose" at them by writing stories about these visits and questioning intentions. We then got a visit from the IRS (as in visit to our web site); what on earth would the IRS want with us.....clearly this was nothing more than intimidation; besides, we were a Canadian corporation and out of their jurisdiction - and I posted a letter to that effect.


I turned my attention to producing our first paper and was rewarded with many viruses and a strange "hijack" to my computer that at first looked like the usual "Cool Web" browser redirects to search engines on the net. However, this particular hijack was never seen before and kept changing so I could never get any of the "fixes" to work at the various venues created for these problems. I just let be and continued formatting our paper, I did not want to do anything drastic that might result in the loss of files at this critical time. At the time I made note of the situation being like: "sleeping with the enemy". After the release of the paper, I deleted the operating system on my computer and looked for damaged programs and found one in the start menu (which I deleted and solved the problem) and 188 data miners found throughout my computer


I figured that was the end of it.....boy was I wrong.....


Shit Hits Fan!


Warning bells started to clang when photos of prisoner mistreatment at occupation prisons in Iraq, began to surface. Our venue started to get hits from around the world and some new I.P. hits from U.S. Government agencies. Some looked like regular "soldier" visits from Afghanistan; but one was from the U.S. Navy and another was definitely from U.S. military intelligence in Europe. I even got two visits from the State Of Delaware (presumably to see if I was incorporated internationally as the State Of Delaware is the only location in the world that handles this). Other governments paid a visit including a rather eloquent I.P. address from the French Ministry of Defense. I then noticed that the Yahoo.com search engine was redirecting hundreds to our site and confirmed this with several "key phrases". The world was looking in: Canada, U.K., U.S.A., France, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Turkey, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Singapore, Finland, Malaysia, The Bahamas, the list went on..... But the biggest I. P. hit took place when Donald Rumsfeld was testifying about his troop's involvement in those much publicized prisoner abuse allegations.

On Friday May 7, 2004 at 4:30PM; The U.S. House Of Representatives went to our site and pulled up all the soldier's photos from Iraq. They did not even fumble around to find them; straight to the photos.....someone knew the way..... That was one big moment for me, that was when the original purpose for our venue became fulfilled! That particular soldier made his voice heard!


Payback Time! Target Fortressoffreedom.com!

A few days after that proud moment, I began to get computer system attacks that I never got before. All seemed to be aimed at my internet connection. I would lose the drivers, the hardware became unrecognized, then the browser got harder and harder to pull up pages on the internet. This became worse but only specific to my regular computer. My secondary computer was unaffected. I tried to reinstall my operating system and found that I could not do this as something was messed with on the hard drive - I had to format the entire drive and loose all the data on my C drive. This would probably have been devastating to most; but I had saved critical information on to disc and I run dual hard drives which duplicated my information (except the operating system). I reformatted the computer three times, ran virus scans that all came back negative.....What was going on?

I began to rely on my secondary computer, this then was attacked with some really bizarre actions with the modem and then the complete shut down of the browser. At the present time my secondary computer is incapable of surfing the net and I am using another browser on my main computer. Nothing has been resolved as to what happened to those two browsers and they are now useless.....


The Coast Is Clear

What do I make of all this? In the efforts to be a good journalist; there is not much I really can say about this. I have my suspicions, but without any connection, or concrete proof - it would be nothing but speculation. I do believe I was under attack, and the timing is telling. Furthermore, I was totally consumed with fixing my computer and disconnected from our venue and orgaization to the extent that I had to leave the web site in the hands of our very own Sue! If someone or some agency wanted to shut me up ore prevent further publication of more photos (this soldier had hundreds, and videos.....), they did a good job.....still this is nothing but speculation. Take into account that I have dial-up and Windows 98 that is not vulnerable to virus attack to the extent Windows XP is. I had never received a virus in the previous two years leading up to the paper.....then..... We can connect the dots, and rationalize a probable series of events, but that is from "my" reality - the "real" reality could be the same or different. This "is" the reality of warfare on the internet - the new form of Cyber War! A war of anonymity, subtle persuasion and out and out intimidation. You make up your own mind as to what happened, the real reality remains unseen.




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