The first Hacker World War...

"We have come to woop-ass and chew bubble gum...
and we just ran out of bubble gum...
Project China is in effect!"

FuxOr, Hacked Chinese Website, 2001

A few weeks back, I wrote about the online cyber-war between Ebaumsworld and Ytmnd.com. I was dismayed to see people calling it the "first online cyber-war". It wasn't. The first contender for this title actually happened back in 2001. Step up to the plate one fighter pilot and a whole bunch of US troops...

In the beginning...

...there was light. And that light was the fuel-propelled explosion of a fighter plane slicing right through a US carrier, which was forced to make an emergency landing on Chinese ground. And following on from the untimely demise of the (unfortunately named) Chinese pilot Wang, due to his dubious collision with an American plane that, as one American Hacker so eloquently put it, had all the agility of "A flying dildo", so began a "World Hacker War" that has been somewhat lost to the mists of time. I'm looking to put that right.

Immediate after-effects

With typical well-rounded insight shown by the Chinese Government, they boarded the plane and effectively put the US troops under a form of house-arrest. This caused problems enough offline, but online it was the spark that would set alight the online cyber-war. For some time, sibling rivalry had flared between the hacker groups across the globe. Israelis and Palestinians had been engaging in skirmishes for some time, but never on the scale we were about to see. Skip forward to the present day, and there are currently guys in the Middle-East whose hacking talents are flourishing; back then, AZN Pride was where it was at, and both groups were just dying for an excuse to go head to head. The plane crash gave that "gift" to everyone concerned. Within days, rumours began - on the Internets, of course - that something heavy was about to go down.

At the time, some of the most hardcore hacker groups in the US were groups like Hackweiser, Hi-Tec Hate Crew, outsiders like PoizonBOx and "lone gunmen" like Pr0phet, who looked to justify their actions by tying them to a variety of political ideologies. It's interesting to see how much this is used as a justification for today's hack attacks (ie - all of them).

In China, the lion was about to roar - HUC (Honkers Union of China) and RedFreedom were distributing easy to use D0S tools and also uploading step-by-step tutorials onto their sites, in an effort to encourage everyone to join the hackfest.

In America, there were hackers who had previously been shunned their whole lives, suddenly finding themselves giving interviews to the press about how they thought the war was going to go. Indeed, here's one interview with Pr0phet, who talks a fair deal about his involvement with the "cyber-war":

To be honest, I think on our side I got the whole ball rolling. Then poisonb0x was like "what the hell" (not even from the US) and started going nuts on NT servers, then from there it almost just got popular to be involved. Then thats when it started getting stupid.

Yeah, you tell 'em, big guy.

The ball gets rolling

Let's check out the timeline from a Wired news article:

May 1, timed to coincide with two major Chinese holidays. May 1 is Laodong Jie Wuy (International Workers Day). May 4 is Qingnian Jie (Youth Day) in China, a national holiday commemorating demonstrations that occurred in Beijing's Tiananmen Square on May 4, 1919, protesting the interference of foreign powers involvement in Chinese politics. The cyberwar is planned to end on May 7, the two-year anniversary of the bombing of the Chinese embassy.

Of course, things got out of hand pretty quickly, and before long, hackers from every tech-savvy nation on Earth got involved, each using their own political allegiances to side with the US or China. Even long-time gone hackers such as Acidklown re-emerged back onto the scene, spotting the chance for furthering political aims, a splash of free publicity or (in a lot of cases) both.

Runaway train

Here's an archived page of defacements by Poizonb0x. None of the individual pages work, but it'll give you some sort of idea of how prolific some of these guys were. The Chinese held their own, too - here's a defaced page done by someone who evidently got the hang of the previously mentioned "hacker guides" on the HUC website. And here's all the hacked mirrors you could ever want by some of the Chinese groups involved in this. A lot of these are actually still viewable - click the hyperlinked Chinese text just left of centre on the page. A word of warning, however - a small handful of pages from this hackfest had rather basic viruses uploaded with the hacked webpages. These were pretty primitive though, though you still view at your own risk!

The American pages were fairly inventive, though the humour tended to turn ugly and get all racial and stuff. The Chinese pages were a lot more straightforward - example here, and here.

This is the end...

...and the end was a whimper, not a bang. It all kicked off in such brazen style - then the race slurs got out of hand, along with some pretty sickening attacks on the dead Chinese pilot. Seriously, when it gets to the stage of things like the picture to the left, it really is time to call it quits.

However - people wouldn't listen, which made many of the people who had kicked this whole thing off back out in "disgust". I phrase it like that, because these guys were happy to ride the wave of publicity while it lasted. Check out some of the rebukes here, here, here and here. Notice how Pr0phet is so offended by it all, he does two "final" defacements. yeah, makes no sense to me either. Oh well.

Sad to say, but the only thing that came close to something approaching an "intelligent" post during the whole sorry affair was this particularly barbed set of comments from Hackah Jak of Hackweiser. Some snippets:

Dear China,
We're sorry that you don't train your fighter pilots better. As a token of our apology, here's a copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2000.(Please take note of the Copyright)

We're sorry that you believe your territorial waters extend all the way to Australia. For future reference, here's an American 6th grade geography textbook. (Please take note of the Copyright information printed inside the cover.)

We're especially sorry for treating you with such respect for the last 20 years. We will definitely rethink this policy and probably go back to treating you like a common, untrustworthy street gang very soon.

And most of all, we're sorry for the Chinese people who suffer its leaders' incompetence.

Ouch!

The total of hacked boxes is impossible to estimate; there was too much overblowing of this whole event in mediacircles, coupled with lots of security firms who were going ga-ga in an attempt to sell more units. Plus, here's an interesting account on how hackers only started using the political agenda once Wired wrote a self-fulfilling, prophetic story on this whole mess. It's safe to say a whole lot of sites were screwed over - I just have no idea how to go about estimating the damage done.

But in terms of the reputations of the hackers involved, the damage was immense. A lot of the "big names" involved fell our of the scene altogether, and people like Acidklown seemed to vanish as quickly as they had reappeared.

Amazing to think that the next great "cyber-war" would be fought over a picture of Lindsay Lohan. I don't know whether that makes me want to laugh or cry.

Probably a little of both.