Word: hackers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Another wrinkle: once the initial attack (wherever it may have originated) was under way, it's entirely possible that other, unconnected hackers joined the fray. "If you're a hacker, and you see something like that going on, you can use the opportunity to test out your capabilities, masking them under the original attack," says Roger Baker, East Asia analyst at Stratfor, a global intelligence company. (Read a brief history of cybercrime...
Then there's the nature of the attacks: crude and essentially harmless. Cyberexperts call them denial-of-service (DOS) attacks, because they do no more harm than slow down or temporarily shut down networks. No sensitive government network was affected: the hackers (or lone hacker, since this could easily be the work of one person) only went after unrestricted, so-called public-facing sites. The assumption among some cyberexperts is that such unsophisticated attacks must come from an unsophisticated source...
There's also the possibility that the perpetrator is much closer to home - some hacker testing his skills from a cybercafé in Washington. Experts don't rule that out, but say it's unlikely...
...recently that starting July 1, all computers sold in China would be required to have pornography-filtering software pre-installed. The news caused outrage among Chinese computer users, many of whom complained that the software, called Green Dam Youth Escort, was ineffective and would expose users to viruses and hacker attacks. Meanwhile, a U.S. company, Solid Oak Software, alleged that the program had illegally incorporated parts of its proprietary software...
...Boyer, the original hacker journalist, prefers to put it differently, likening the paradigm shift to the old adage that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. "If the source of the tumult in the news business is technology," he says, "then journalism needs more nerds...