Some computer types sympathetic to Israel are putting their know-how to work to create a volunteer botnet army to flood Hamas-friendly Gazan web servers. It's called the "Help-Israel-Win" project.
'The group’s website - which is moving around as pro-Palestinian hackers flood it with DDOS attacks - invites partisans to download an .exe file, install it on their computers and start it from a link on their desktop. The website - with instructions available in Hebrew, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian - doesn’t make it very clear what the tool does: “We created a project that unites the computer capabilities of many people around the world. Our goal is to use this power in order to disrupt our enemy’s efforts to destroy the state of Israel. The more support we get, the efficient we are!” In response to apparent user concerns, it includes the reassurances, “The file is harmless to your computer and could be immediately removed. There is no need for identification of any kind - anonymity guaranteed!”'
This is an extension of the typical kind of botnet war - people use a virus to embed code in the computers of unsuspecting users. These viruses execute commands that send requests to a given server and crash it with an overload of traffic. A similar attack brought Estonia's internet infrastructure to its knees in 2007.
It's not an uncommon tactic, and there are no doubt several people on the Palestinian side of the conflict using them. It is interesting that these people are asking people to put a virus on their own computer. It's also weird that people will probably take them up on it.
