Johannes Ullrich, on the SANS Internet Storm Center diary, on reports (including ours) that al Qaeda-trained cyberattackers are playing a e-jihad on Nov. 11:

“So in short: stay calm, focus on best practices and you don’t have to do anything special on Nov. 11. If your systems are secure, they will be fine. If they are not secure, they will get hacked no matter if it’s cyber jihad or the script kiddie from next door.

In the past, political attacks like this resulted in some more or less manual DoS attacks. Expect things like calls for supporters to reload particular ‘offensive’ websites, or use the ping command to flood them. In some cases, supporters may be asked to install trojans. But chances are that the usual criminals will just take advantage of this and use it as a trick to install the regular criminal bots.”

Johannes might be right. The site that reported the coming e-jihad, DEBKAfile, has been known to get things wrong. We’ll know one way or the other on Sunday.