Online Terrorist Attack Scheduled for November 11

November 11 tends to become the online flavor of September 11 as a group of terrorists linked to the Muslim extremists demanded the virtual world's support to organize some attacks targeting the financial websites on the Internet. Security Focus reports that the terrorists are planning to use Electronic Jihad 2.0, a software solution which would be able to launch denial-of-service (DoS) attacks on several pages. "While older versions of the attack program required users to manually input the targets, the latest version allows a central server to control who is attacked, said Paul Henry, vice president of Secure Computing," Security Focus wrote in an article published today.

"If you look at the translated site, they are talking about causing financial harm, so I assume they are talking about financial sites. Before it was primarily Israeli sites -- now they have claimed they are going after Western interests," the Secure Computing official said for the same source mentioned above.

This wouldn't be the first time when the terrorists aim to join forces to launch attacks over the same target. Security Focus reported that there were several cases in the past when the threats turned to be only fake calls for support. "In 2004, a similar call failed to generate any threat, while news of another religious-inspired attack in 2003 turned out to be a hoax."

But the most important aspect of this piece of news is that the terrorists are becoming more and more tech-savvy which is pretty dangerous for all of us, the Internet users. Some extremists turned to Google Earth to obtain terrain details with certain areas which were supposed to be attacked.

For example, Google's downloadable mapping tool was used by the extremists in order to launch attacks against the UK troops located in Basra. The Mountain View company took the decision to replace the photos with older ones, captured before the departure of the army in the area.