Foreign Terrorist Organizations—Web Hosting

Hezbollah, as a recent Newsweek article describes,^[1] is far from an unsophisticated band of thugs. Besides their advanced weaponry, they also, apparently, know how to hijack ISP customers’ accounts.

Hezbollah operates the Al-Manar satellite television station, which briefly “got its video-streaming Web site connected to the Internet through an Austin company this week apparently by hacking into a customer’s equipment.”^[2] Austin-based Broadwing Communications “said it pulled the plug on the customer’s hijacked Internet link,” because it “concluded that [its] services were being used in violation of [its] Acceptable Use Policy.”^[3]

Broadwing is “cooperating with treasury department agents in their investigation of the perpetrators,” and the customer, whose site seems to have been unwittingly used, is “a small US cable broadcaster [which] is linked to a satellite provider it uses to distribute its programming.”^[4] The satellite provider had communication links to Lebanon, and what happened “was that the satellite provider erroneously connected a feed from Lebanon to Broadwing’s customer. The perpetrator came through the link, hijacked the customer’s equipment and launched Al-Manar onto the Internet.”^[5]

After Broadwing pulled the plug, Al-Manar “reappeared later in the week on a private cable line on Staten Island,” which also seems to have been a hacking attempt.^[6] It, too was shut down, but it popped back up in India, and “appears to have shut right back down."^[7] “In the cyberterrorism trade it is known as ‘whack-a-mole’—just like the old carnival game, Hizballah sites pop up, get whacked down and then pop up again somewhere else on the World Wide Web.”^[8]

Al-Manar has been designated a terrorist entity by the US Treasury Department, and thus it is illegal for any US company to do business with it.^[9] Hacking American services, therefore, is a way for Al-Manar to broadcast its signal because its stations have been bombed by the Israelis.^[10]

---

[1] Kevin Peraino, Eye for an Eye, Newseeek (via msnbc.com), Aug. 14, 2006.
[2] Todd Bensman, Hezbollah Site Used Hijacked Computer, San Antonio Express-News, Aug. 4, 2006.
[3] Id.
[4] Id.
[5] Id.
[6] Id.
[7] Hezbollah Hijacked Part of Broadwing’s Network, KXAN.com, Aug. 2, 2006.
[8] Hilary Hylton, Now Hizballah Hijacks the Internet, Time, Aug. 8, 2006.
[9] Bensman, supra note 2.
[10] Id.