The Muhammed cartoons controversy has now gone online with almost 1000 websites, including 600 Danish ones as well as Israeli and other western servers, being defaced by Islamic hackers.

The attacks typically replace home pages with pro-Islam messages and condemn the publication of the images.

Hack attack monitoring group Zone-H said the defacements were done both by hacker groups and individuals.

Zone-H said some hackers left moderate messages but many called for a violent response to the cartoons’ publication.

According to the Zone-H report:

What came out from the survey is what Zone-H very much expected: the use of the Internet as an instrument to spread out cyber protests related to what happens in the worldwide context. Several hacker groups from different Muslim nations united their forces in order to produce the larger amount of damages in Danish and more generally western web-servers. During the attacks they promoted both moderate and extremists manifestos through the defacement of the homepages promoting also a boycott campaign throughout the digital Ummah against Danish products.

Zone-H are still receiving news of digital attacks of Islamic connotation and there is little evidence so far that western hacker groups were taking any action in retaliation.

Most of the sites being targetted are run by small organisations and companies that do not have dedicated security workers and cannot keep up with the latest alerts and patches for vulnerabilities.

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