Skip to main content

Domestic cyber war finally arrives

[h/t Delawareliberal via the Kos]

So the Soapbox blog platform has been hacked, cracked, and dropped. If reports today are correct, the folks at Soapbox have no intention of staying in business. Overwhelmingly (I trust DelDem for this) Soapbox has been a host for liberal/progressive blogs, and so the chatter is about some sort of Conservative/GOPer attack.

None of this is new, even though the intensity has increased. For example, at least two political blogs I check fairly frequently (Independent Political Report and Libertarian Republican) have been attacked and taken down for as much as a day or two within recent memory.

Bruce Sterling, father of SF cyberpunk, must be bemused to see this happening.

You may recall that in the mid-1990s when we were bombing the shit out of the Serbians over Kossovo, Serbia tried to hack both NATO and US sites; groups reportedly associated with Al Qaeda or other Islamist movements have attempted cracking over the past few years, and it used to be that when you visited Al Qaeda's original website this Eagle jumped out at you with a message something like This site hacked, cracked, and jacked by the FBI.

I'm probably (make that certainly) on a list somewhere for knowing that, and for admitting to visiting the Al Qaeda website.

Friends in other places suggest to me that, aside from targeting cell phone towers, keeping reporters out of Gaza, and starting its own YouTube channel, the Israeli Defense Force also has an active presence hacking and cracking Palestinian blogs and websites. I don't visit any of them often enough to know.

There is also at least one story (just a hair above the urban legend category) that about six years ago somebody made a serious run at hacking and cracking the control software for one of Gazprom's major refinery sites in Russia, and actually caused some major problems that ended just short of a disastrous shutdown. Russia's never really admitted to it, but friends with the right connections tell me there is something to the story.

Obviously, corporate security concerns have been rising in this area for the past decade as well.

But it had to be only a matter of time before blogging--that most egalitarian form of the new media fell prey to this, primarily because of the platform bottleneck effect. If I put up a political website (like Moveon.org or something), then that site has to be individually hacked and cracked, and even success won't take down anybody else. But most of the tens of thousands of blogs out there now depend on a relative handful of common platforms.

Sink Soapbox and you sink a lot of liberal/progressive blogs (along with, I'm sure, a lot of nice people blogging about their gardens, or adoption, or investment strategieis--we sometimes tend to forget that the political blogosphere is only a sub-set of the whole).

The immediate take, of course, is split between an ideologically motivated attack (70% of the comments I've seen) and the old hackers will hack anything that looks vulnerable (30%).

I have a different take. I think there is a very real possibility that the authors of this attack picked their victim carefully, but with more interest in market-share than ideology, and more interest in advertising their capabilities than shutting down liberal/progressive voices.

Consider: as the number of blogging platforms has begun to increase, the smaller, almost boutique platforms have tended to do something that Blogger and Wordpress didn't do: attract specific, distinct market segments. I'd guess that some of their features were even designed to appeal to political or-even more specifically--progressive political bloggers. With a good market share of a distinct genre, replete with successful branding, this has the unintended consequence of also making specific market segments more vulnerable to a sector attack.

This development, quite frankly, is only to be expected. Information war is often mistakenly regarded as some sort of cyberpunk concept, but it has existed in different guises for centuries--at the very least since the explosion of capitalist economic activity in Western Europe in the 1500s.

And you can be pretty sure that the new battlefield is going to be dominated by three or four specific types:

1) The Hired Guns: people who will hack and crack anybody on any side at any time ... for a price.

2) The Zealots: people committed to an ideology and committed to shutting down the opponent's voice ... by any means necessary (sorry, Malcolm).

3) The Defenders: people who will make a living selling a sense of security to fear-filled bloggers ... as opposed to selling them real security. That age is pretty much over.

4) The Regulators: people who will inevitably argue that this despicable behavior calls for more government regulation and control of the blogosphere (and the whole Internet for that matter). If you think I'm full of shit here, read about what's currently happening in Australia, Great Britain, and even in the so-called Net Neutrality movement.

The new reality is this: you have no inherent right for your speech on the internet to be protected by anyone except for people you pay to do that job. And--at this point--it is arguable exactly what kind of crime the hackers and crackers who took down Soapbox have committed. At best, a crime against Soapbox; the company's clients will not have (and should not have) any recourse against the people who attacked Soapbox, which means you'd best select your blogging platform very carefully.

Comments

Delaware Watch said…
I'm sure you don't mean it this way but this sounds like you are making a distinction between liberal/progressive bloggers and "nice people":

"Sink Soapbox and you sink a lot of liberal/progressive blogs (along with, I'm sure, a lot of nice people blogging about their gardens, or adoption, or investment strategieis....)
Dana,
I actually meant to draw that distinction between ALL political bloggers and those other nice people....

But you're right--I structured the sentence poorly

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?