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 As most international magazines reported today, the US Government has just warned US financial services about a worrying announcement seen on an al-Qaeda website. The message is actually a call for a cyber attack against US stock trading and banking websites that is believed to be performed by the end of December.
A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, Russ Knocke, said that in spite of the fact that there are no specific clues suggesting that the attack will actually take place, the Homeland Security department has issued the warning out of an "abundance of caution".
"There is no information to corroborate this aspirational threat. As a routine matter and out of an abundance of caution, US-CERT issued the situational awareness report to industry stakeholders," said Knocke.
US-CERT is the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team. The US government said the threat was a form of revenge against the holding of suspected terrorists at the US prison in Guantanamo.
Even if we cannot confirm the existence of a real danger, we can say that the possibility that attacks could be set up as a revenge is verisimilar. Indeed among Jihadi fighters there is a sort of Cult in memory of their companion who were killed or imprisoned. And many initiatives are planned and performed with a commemorative purpose.
For example, on November 19, a Jihadi website posted an eight-minute video showing images from a jihad rally held in Muzaffarabad, Azad Kashmir, "in commemoration of Ghazi Shahabuddin and Khalid Ansari - killed May 6, 2004 in Indian Jammu and Kashmir."
The video is subtitled in English and shows a man declaring that in Muslim history, “no Muslim problem had ever been solved through negotiations, but only on the battlefield. He says that in negotiations, the Muslims are always swindled, just as the Palestinians were swindled at Camp David and the Afghans were swindled by the Geneva Agreement.” At the very end of the video, the man says that there are 56 Muslim countries in the world, but all of them have succumbed to the "forces of the Devil" , that’s why only the mujahideen can defend Islam's honor in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Kashmir.
These pieces of news show the importance of the digital ground in cyber jihad: in the first case the digital ground is presented as a real battlefield and in the second one it is seen as a stage where Jihadi can spread their propaganda.
But that’s not all: cyber jihad is getting more and more organized , and now Jihadi fighters can also count on a specialized “official magazine” dealing with technical and theoretical aspects of It security.
On November 28, indeed, the first issue of the Technical MujahidMagazine was released. The magazine discusses various technical topics and claims to be aimed "to help prevent acts of aggression against Muslims [in cyberspace], and to assist the mujahideen in their efforts."
In the introduction it is also explained that "the Internet provides a golden opportunity... for the mujahideen to break the siege placed upon them by the media of the Crusaders and their followers in the Muslim countries, and to use [the Internet] for [the sake of] jihad and the victory of the faith."
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