Mujahideens’ cherished companion - cellphones, a.k.a IED remote detonation devices, on OTH GSM networks around the middle east. Indeed Orascom Telecom operates GSM networks in these wonderful countries!
- Algeria (Djezzy)
- Pakistan (Mobilink)
- Egypt (MobiNil)
- Tunisia (Tunisiana)
- Iraq (IraQna: a part of Zain)
- Bangladesh (Banglalink)
- Zimbabwe (Telecel Zimbabwe)
…and now, here comes another wonderland - North Korea!!
Here’s an excerpt from OTH media release (Jan 30, 2008)
Orascom Telecom Holding S.A.E. (“OTH” or “Orascom Telecom”) announced today that it has been granted the first commercial license to provide mobile telephony services in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (“DPRK”) using WCDMA (3G) technology.
The license was granted to OTH’s subsidiary CHEO Technology JV Company (“CHEO”) which is controlled by Orascom Telecom with an ownership of 75% while the remaining 25% is owned by the state owned Korea Post and Telecommunications Corporation. The terms of the license allows CHEO to offer services to its customer throughout the country, the duration of the license is 25 years with an exclusivity period of four years. Orascom Telecom intends to invest up to US$400 million in network infrastructure and license fee over the first three years in order to rapidly deploy a high quality network and offer voice, data and value added services at accessible prices to the Korean people. OTH intends to cover Pyongyang and most of the major cities during the first 12 months of operations.
The DPRK has a population of approximately 23 million of which 67% is between the age of 15 and 64 years, moreover, there is currently no mobile services in the country. The operation in the DPRK will complement OTH’s existing operations in Asia and will further enhance OTH’s position as the leading GSM operator in the emerging markets.
Naguib Sawiris, Chairman & CEO, Orascom Telecom, stated “We are continuing to head in the right strategic direction; our Greenfield license in the DPRK is in line with our strategy to penetrate countries with high population and low penetration by providing the first mobile telephony services. OTH has consistently proved its ability to successfully roll out mobile services into countries where no other operator has. OTH will continue to increase shareholder value and maintain its leadership in the markets it operates in.”
Yet another “Chinese hackers” topic shown at the beginning of the New Year. Is it largely as a result of being in part to increase their budget for anti cyber-terrorism? I don’t like to be sarcastic but do they really believe the Chinese military organized 1 million hackers into a unit? Seems totally inefficient lunar politics, as though there are no words like “selective basis” in their dics, however it would be good feasible way for CDOS - Chinese Denial of Service.
Military Issues Warning on Chinese Hackers
By Jung Sung-ki
Staff ReporterThe South Korean military has issued a warning that computer systems of soldiers and defense institutes have become the victims of presumed Chinese hacking activities, a military source said Tuesday.
The source said hackers, believed to be Chinese nationals, penetrated computers of soldiers by sending e-mail involving hacking programs falsely titled “the situation on North Korea’s arms power.”
“We are now investigating several cyber hacking cases believed to be conducted by Chinese nationals based on evidence that the hackers stole information stored in soldiers’ computers,” the source said, asking not to be named.
The hackers appeared to have penetrated Web sites of military units and retired soldiers to steal e-mail adresses of individuals registered to the sites, he said.
The Defense Security Command recently distributed up-to-date vaccine programs to service members as a precautionary measure, he added.
Cyber attacks from China have become frequent and aggressive in recent years, according to reports.
The Chinese military created a cyber-hacking unit named “NET Force” in 2000 operated by about 1 million hackers, the reports said.
In 2004, the state-funded Korea Institute for Defense Analyses was hacked by a Chinese person.
Reports said last year Chinese military hackers were preparing a detailed plan to disable America’s aircraft carrier fleet as part of an aggressive push by Beijing to achieve “electronic dominance” over each of its global rivals by 2050, particularly the United States, Britain, Russia and South Korea.
The U.S. Department of Defense said China’s military regards offensive computer operations as “critical to seize the initiative” in the first stages of a war.
735,598 computers…Is this number big or small? seems quite reasonable though.
China ‘has .75M zombie computers’ in U.S.
WASHINGTON, Sept. 17 (UPI) — A former senior U.S. information security official says there are nearly three-quarter million personal computers in the United States taken over by Chinese hackers.
“This is a fact that should get everyone’s attention,” Paul Strassmann told Government Executive magazine columnist Bob Brewin.
Strassman, who was director of defense information in the early 1990s, is now back at the Pentagon as a senior advisor, according to Brewin.
“As of the morning of Sept. 14, there were exactly (remember, Strassmann is an engineer and likes precision) 735,598 computers in the United States infested by Chinese zombies,” writes Brewin in his Monday column.
Zombies are malicious software packages downloaded by unsuspecting users from infected e-mail messages or Web sites.
They infect computers at a very basic level, making them hard to find and root out, and they enable the hackers who wrote them to create large networks of “slave” computers that can be used in massive, if unsophisticated, cyber attacks using a technique called Denial of Service, or DoS.
DoS attacks aim to overwhelm their target Web sites by flooding them with bogus requests for information from slave networks, also called botnets.
Strassmann described such botnets as “the cheapest attack weapon a nation can buy,” but shied away from directly pointing the finger at the Chinese government, Brewin writes.
DoS attacks, like those carried out against the government of Estonia by Russian hacker gangs earlier this year are relatively unsophisticated, U.S. officials say, and major government and commercial networks in the country would be very hard to bring down that way.
“While no one is immune to cyber attacks,” Mike Witt, deputy director of the U.S. Cyber Emergency Response Team told United Press International at the time, U.S. government networks were “more sophisticated, extensive and diverse,” making them “less susceptible to disruptions or attacks.”
As a former XCon attendee I know that many of Chinese hackers seems to be thoroughly sanitized by market economy, or capitalism, and as you see PLA’s internet strategy seems like a paper tiger so in some sense, I’m pleased to hear the “men of mettle” are still out there.
I’ve heard that, in general, working for PLA is much popular for young Chinese these years. As war fears subside (at least they think so), PLA now is nothing but a good place of employment for its outplacement service and pension program. If that’s true, for them PLA might be one of the objects of weighing stipend and benefits against working for Microsoft / Symantec. Anyway, DoD needs higher budget priority and for them this news surely helps.
China’s Army Hacked Pentagon Network
Deutsche Presse-Agentur | September 05, 2007China’s Army hacked into a computer network at the Pentagon in an attack that has US officials concerned about the growing regularity and sophistication of China’s technological assaults, the Financial Times reported Tuesday.
Computer specialists with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) penetrated an unclassified network used by policy aides to US Defence Secretary Robert Gates in June, resulting in a weeklong shutdown of the system, the newspaper said in a report that quoted unnamed US officials.
The PLA has demonstrated the ability to conduct attacks that disable our system … and the ability in a conflict situation to re-enter and disrupt on a very large scale,” a former official was quoted as saying by the Financial Times, adding that China’s Army has also hacked into the networks of US defence companies and think tanks.
The penetration of the Pentagon network three months ago came after the US Defence Department had staved off the hacker attacks for several months and as China’s military has been testing the Pentagon networks hundreds of times a day for the past few years, the British newspaper said in a report from Washington.
An unnamed senior US official told the Times that “no doubt” existed that China was monitoring e-mails sent on unclassified US government networks.
The report was not the first accusing China’s Army of breaking into the computer networks of foreign governments. Germany’s Der Spiegel news magazine reported two days before German Chancellor Angela Merkel met Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao in Beijing last week that Chinese hackers had infiltrated German government computers with spy programs.
The article said intelligence services suspected hackers in the Chinese army were behind the online attacks on computers in Merkel’s offices, the Foreign Ministry, the Economics Ministry, and the Research and Development Ministry. The first spy programs were found several months ago, it added, citing an investigation by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, and the Federal Office for Information Security.
Although Wen and Merkel did not address the charges in Der Spiegel’s report when they spoke to reporters August 27, Wen vowed that his government would take measures to eliminate hacker attacks.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman also said during Merkel’s visit that Beijing opposes and has outlawed computer hacking and is cooperating with other countries to combat computer crimes
Taixing Glycerine Factory
http://www.chinachemnet.com/chinataixin/index.htm
Chinese Company Linked to Deaths Wasn’t Licensed
By JAKE HOOKER
Published: May 9, 2007
(http://surl.infovlad.net/?ZDEEY)BEIJING, May 8 ・China’s drug regulation agency has confirmed that the company linked to counterfeit medicine that caused at least 100 deaths in Panama was not licensed to be engaged in the pharmaceutical business, the Foreign Ministry said Tuesday.
Jiang Yu, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said the agency, the State Food and Drug Administration, conducted an investigation last year in response to a request by officials at the United States Food and Drug Administration.
Ms. Jiang’s comments, made in a regular Tuesday briefing, were prompted by an article on Sunday in The New York Times that described how cough medicine in Panama was tainted with a poisonous industrial solvent, diethylene glycol, that was traced to a factory in eastern China.
The article reported that the solvent ・which passed through brokers in China, Spain and Panama ・was falsely identified as glycerin, a sweet-tasting syrup that is a common ingredient in medicine.
The Foreign Ministry said neither the chemical company that made the toxic syrup, the Taixing Glycerine Factory, nor the Chinese state-owned trading firm that exported it, CNSC Fortune Way, fell under the regulatory supervision of China’s drug administration.
Ms. Jiang emphasized that Chinese drug manufacturers must follow strict rules in the purchase of raw pharmaceutical ingredients and solvents in medicine. But her comments stopped short of fully addressing the role played by the chemical factory in the deaths in Panama.
Related Story:
From China to Panama, a Trail of Poisoned Medicine
http://surl.infovlad.net/?DJGCT
Scooter and tribeca at clearinghouse posted an interesting story pertaining to arrested online jihadee in the place where abhorrent AQ terrorist attack took place in March, 2004.
As far as confirmed, the guy has two websites: http://www.Salaam1420.com and http://www.vayamovida.com/
The former is already gone (now only google-cached … thx tribeca) but you will see salaam1420’s bio with bunch of nice drawings (yup he has a good aptitude for painting) at the latter. No wonder, since the domain registrant calls itself as “Salaam Studio 1420″.
TERRORISM: TWO ALLEGED JIHADI WEBMASTERS ARRESTED IN SPAIN
Saragozza, 14 March (AKI) - A Spanish man has been arrested in the northeastern town of Zaragoza on suspicion of promoting terrorism on the Internet. A Moroccan citizen was also arrested Wednesday in an unspecified Spanish location during an ongoing anti-terror operation by the Civil Guard which says it may lead to further arrests. The 31-year-old Spaniard and the 23-year-old Moroccan - both male - are allegedly the webmasters of the Spanish jihadist website Al-Andalus Islamiya which publishes messages supporting and justifying Islamist terrorism.
The Spaniard, a web designer who converted to Islam, is alleged to have posted videos to the Al-Andalus Islamiya website containing calls to Jihad and martyrdom. The man, who always used pseudonyms to conceal his identity, spoke of a “front” and posted messages to the website that spoke of a “front” to fight back against “Zionist and/or Islamophobic aggression.”
The Moroccan was born in Oujda but is resident in Huelva province in the southern Spanish region of Andalucia. Anti-terrorism experts in Spain have recently stepped up Internet checks, hunting for prosletising messages on radical Islamist websites.
Three years on from the deadly 11 March 2004 attacks on commuter trains at Madrid’s Atocha station, the risk of a fresh terror attack in Spain is now higher than ever, according to several terrorism experts quoted last week by El Pais daily.
Again, Pakcon III has been rescheduled to May 26th. Again, unexplained alternation.
That’s a bit irresponsible, isn’t it? They don’t seem to think nothing of anyone abroad (if any) whose itinerary got messed up twice. Several months ago they just gave a notice of sudden change of schedule on the top of their website like “PAKCON III has been rescheduled to take place in March of 2007 due to various reasons” without giving appropriate explanations to it. I know it’s almost senseless question though, what were the reasons?
Major Jihadi Forums as of Feb, 2007
(just a memo for myself)
http://www.alfirdaws.org/vb/
http://www.altamkeen.net/vb/
http://www.al-hesbah.org/v/
http://www.al-boraq.com/
http://www.kta2b.com/
http://www.alnusra.net/vb/
http://www.muslm.net/vb/
http://alhanein.com/vb/
http://www.minbar-sos.com/
http://www.al-ekhlaas.net/forum/
http://12.47.45.102/ (al-buraq)
http://www.mohajroon.com/vb/
http://w-n-n.com/
http://www.ribaat.org/ (al mourabitoune)
Totally off topic though, I love this guy 
http://www.veryfunnydownloads.com/404d.php
iaisite.info (72.41.39.245)
http://www.iaisite.info/
Allowing directory indexing:
http://www.iaisite.info/inc/
http://www.iaisite.info/inc/dmenu/
http://www.iaisite.info/inc/images/
So you can easily get the relative path to the root dir:
/hsphere/local/home/albaraq/iaisite.info/
(note: their account is “albaraq”. not “alboraq”)
Now I know http://www.iaisite.info/upload/thumbnails/ dir doesn’t allow to be pried, but…what the heck is this??
http://www.iaisite.info/upload/
IAI sites currently working as of Feb 13:
http://www.iaisite.info/
http://www.iaisite.org/ (redirected to iaisite.info)
http://www.jubaonline.org/
http://www.al-boraq.org/ (IAI media outlet)
http://lee-flash.com/
(redirected to http://d3130.servadmin.com/~leeflash/)
Vintage IAI sites (mirrors)
http://www.infovlad.net/mirror_sites/iairaqws.temp.powweb.com/
http://www.infovlad.net/mirror_sites/www.jubaonline.net/
(Juba site in the making)
The Voice of Jihad (http://www.sawtaljihad.org/), a newly created Jihad site with older version of WordPress (2.0.8… “2.0.8″ ever existed?) and Google Analystics, uses a couple of nameservers on mohajroon.com.
sawtaljihad.org (208.64.27.42)
R & D Technologies, LLC RDTECH-NET-1 (NET-208-64-24-0-1)
208.64.24.0 - 208.64.31.255
Branzone, Inc BRANZONE-NET-2 (NET-208-64-27-32-1)
208.64.27.32 - 208.64.27.47
sawtaljihad.org. 4H IN A 208.64.27.42
sawtaljihad.org. 1D IN NS ns1.mohajroon.com (208.64.27.42)
sawtaljihad.org. 1D IN NS ns2.mohajroon.com (208.64.27.43)
