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August 15, 1999

Riot organisers prepare to launch cyber war on City

Sunday Times

Jonathan Ungoed-Thomas and Maeve Sheehan

ACTIVISTS who organised the City riot have been trained in hacking techniques to attack the computer networks of banks and financial institutions, an investigation has revealed.

Members of Reclaim the Streets, which co-ordinated the June 18 action, have sought advice from America on sabotaging computer sites and have recruited teams of British-based hackers. City companies have now called in consultants to protect their systems.

The threat comes after a report on the proliferation of political hacking from the National Criminal Intelligence Service. The Animal Liberation Front, anti-nuclear protesters and pro-democracy groups opposed to the Chinese government have already infiltrated several sites.

Environmental activists, too, are employing the techniques of the cyber terrorist. The Sunday Times has discovered that several companies and institutions, including the Stock Exchange, Barclays and HSBC, were targeted by teams of hackers during the anti-capitalist demonstration.

The attack was co-ordinated with teams of hackers from Indonesia, Israel, Germany and Canada. For five hours at least 20 companies were subjected to more than 10,000 attacks by hackers. Other activists used a program called floodnet to block or crash web sites.

"There were repeated attempts to penetrate the security that were all being done remotely," said Dr Neil Barrett, who has advised police on internet crime and is a technical director at Information Risk Management, a computer security company.

"There were thousands of attacks on a number of sites. The tactics were crude but they were clearly co-ordinated with the J18 protest."

The companies targeted did not report the attacks to police, but several have now reviewed security. They also intend to improve protection for fibre access points in the street, where mobile hackers could try to infiltrate internal systems.

Another software consultant who works for a number of City firms confirmed the attack. "In the case of June 18, we saw eco-terrorism done by computers," said D K Matai, managing director of Mi2g. "We were monitoring it and a number of companies were under attack from hackers all over the world."

Although the attacks caused no serious damage, computer staff in the City fear that hackers could cause havoc if they used more sophisticated techniques or gained access to buildings. They are particularly concerned because protesters broke into the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange (Liffe) building.

"A political hacker who knew what he was doing inside your building and inside your computer system would be a disaster," said one expert.

Detectives investigating the riot say it took more than 12 months to prepare. The plan to combine the street protest with an attack by hackers is believed to date back to last September, when London members of Reclaim the Streets attended a seminar in Manchester on information warfare.

Among those present was Ricardo Dominguez, 40, who describes himself as a cyber artist and is one of the key activists behind the Electronic Civil Disobedience movement in America.

"I told them about 'swarming', in which you have a street protest and at the same time use hackers to attack certain targets," said Dominguez last week. "I met a number of people from Reclaim the Streets. They wanted a network of hackers and wanted to know how to get in touch with these people and how to motivate them."

Dominguez also told the activists about the floodnet device used by the group he founded, the Electronic Disturbance Theatre, to target sites including the Pentagon in protest at the plight of the Zapatistas in Mexico; but Dominguez says he does not hack into sites.

In the months before June 18, hacking groups in Britain and abroad were e-mailed instructions. The floodnet device was widely available on the internet under the J18 banner.

Software consultants said City firms did not report the attacks because of their reluctance to highlight computer security issues. Barclays, HSBC and the Stock Exchange said last week that none of their systems was infiltrated and there was no serious threat. "We are very security-conscious and this isn't something we want to talk about," said a Stock Exchange spokesman.

Computer analysts believe experienced hackers joined the J18 attack to study the systems of City finance houses. In an e-mail message to The Sunday Times, a Hull-based hacker known only as Syncom said the most likely date for a further attack would be January 1 and financial institutions would be primary targets.

City police are sceptical that a protest similar to J18 could be organised within the next few months. "We know there is talk about something happening on the first day of the millennium, but intelligence sources do not suggest there is anything planned on the scale of the June protest," said Detective Inspector Kevin Moore.

However, many in the protest movement believe that direct action on the streets is preferable to sitting at a computer and trying to attack a corporation.

Such a view is reflected at this week's Suffolk gathering of the ecological group Earth First. There are no advertised workshops on hacking, but lessons are promised on lock-picking, climbing and self-defence.

Additional reporting: Mark Macaskill and Hilary Scott