Report: Al-Qaeda websites down for 12 days

Websites associated with the international terrorist network al-Qaeda were hacked and have been offline for at least 12 days, a hacker news site reported Friday. The Hacker News said this was the longest sustained outage of online forums frequently visited by al-Qaeda operatives, including al-Fida and Shamukh al-Islam. "No one has claimed responsibility for disabling the sites but the breadth and duration of the outages have prompted speculation the forums have been taken down in a cyber attack launched perhaps by a government or hacking group," The Hacker News reported. But it said the Shumkah site went live again Wednesday with a message that the cyberattack was “a failed, miserable campaign,” according to a translation of the message by security consultant Flashpoint Partners. “The enemies of Allah who boast of their freedoms have not spared any effort to eradicate our blessed media... Even if it succeeded in stopping the forum, it didn't succeed in achieving its desired aims and goals,” the forum said. The Hacker News report quoted James Lewis, director of the technology and public policy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, as saying this could have been the work of any number of governments or private hackers. On the other hand, it said some analysts speculated the administrators of the sites may have just taken them down if they suspected foreign spies infiltrated the forums. "Repeated attacks probably will force the jihadists to improve their security, making it more difficult for any intelligence agency trying to hack any network," it said. — LBG, GMA News