Fergie's Tech Blog

Political 'Hackers' Accused of Targeting Amazon

William Eazel writes on SC Magazine Online:

Politically motivated "hackers" have been accused of tricking Amazon into sending a message "to possibly hundreds of thousands" of its customers drawing attention to a controversial book, "Samson Blinded: A Machiavellian Perspective on the Middle East Conflict". The message was phrased in terms designed to irritate its recipients.

The book's author, an anonymous politician known as Obadiah Shoher, explained that the attackers used Amazon's "scarcely protected" Invite feature, intended for communication between the online retailer's customers. Within hours, annoyed customers flooded Amazon's webpages, damning the book with negative reviews.

Shoher accused anti-Semitic hackers of staging the incident to cause negative publicity in response to recent cyberattacks, reportedly by his followers on Neo-Nazi websites. He wrote in the book: "The targets should include insurgent groups' official websites but also forums, chat rooms, secondary Islamist support sites, and so on. Security services should log the IP addresses of everyone who visits those sites and track them down, even subpoena them through the local police."

posted by Fergie @ 4/11/2006 06:09:00 AM