Disinfo: Hackers Attack Iraq's Vulnerable Computers

Charles Levinson, USA TODAY: Maj. Ahmed Khathem, the head of Iraq's newly formed cybercrimes division, sits in a borrowed office, at a borrowed desk, working on a laptop borrowed from one of his subordinates.It is his unit's lone computer, highlighting the country's vulnerability to a community of Iraqi hackers defacing websites and attempting to hack into sensitive internal networks. Iraq's government is engaged in a bloody struggle against al-Qaeda, and its computers make a prime target for global terror networks that have added hacking to their arsenal."We could have the most powerful anti-hacking force in the world, but we'd still have no computers, so we couldn't do anything," says Ali Hussein, one of 12 computer science graduates added to the cybercrime team last month. "The government thinks about guns, tanks and raiding houses. Hackers just aren't a priority."Computer usage in Iraq has mushroomed since the U.S. invasion in 2003. During the Saddam Hussein era, Internet access was largely forbidden in the country, and economic sanctions made computers difficult to obtain. The Interior Ministry, which had no computers connected to the Internet in 2003, has 5,000 today.