VirtualJihad against Facebook

On May 20th, a group who claim to be motivated by various "Freedom of Expression" announced that they were holding "Everybody Draw Mohammad Day". As everyone knows by know, on September 30, 2005, a Danish newspaper chose to publish several cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, including one of the prophet with his turban containing a bomb, which was drawn by Kurt Westergaard. This was the first many Westerners learned of the Islamic tradition that the prophet should never be depicted. The controversy has continued since then, with various papers reprinting the cartoons, and various Islamic nations then banning those papers, or calling for acts of violence against their editors. In January of 2010, Westergaard's home was broken into by an Islamic man who chopped through his door with an axe and desired to kill him with a knife.

The current "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" craze was not inspired by Westergaard, but rather by death threats against the SouthPark artists, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, who depicted the Prophet Mohammed wearing a bear suit. Seattle-based cartoonist Molly Norris ran a cartoon suggesting that May 20th, be declared "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" sponsored by "Citizens Against Citizens Against Humor or CACAH", which she has now retracted by scribbling notes on her own cartoon:



Unfortunately for Molly, many folks took her seriously, creating a special website to receive their submitted drawings, and more relevantly to our topic today, they also created a Facebook group, "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day."

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The creation of the Facebook Group lead to several national bans of Facebook, including bans by Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the United Arab Eremites. The UAE and Saudi Arabia both made "line item veto" bans blocking only the offending group on Facebook, while the first two banned the entire website. (Update: Pakistan lifted their "blanket" ban on May 31st after Facebook actually censored the offending group.)

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Pakistani media reported that "hacking fraternities" were being formed to "take revenge" on the "blasphemous companies". Pakistani residents have reported receiving SMS text messages encouraging them to participate in DDOS attacks. The website "drawmohammed.com" has also been repeatedly defaced by Islamic hackers since this event began.

Perhaps the most outrageous response has been the encouragement to download the attack tool that is being spread to help people DDOS.

The Google Group "Muslims United" was created May 19th and has been actively attacking "offensive" websites. The main banner proclaims the site to be the "Anti-Draw-Muhammad (P.B.U.H.) -DAY", and currently has 1800 messages. Several of these relate to the "virtualjihad.net" website, where the DDOS tool is included.





VirtualJihad.net was registered on May 19th from the website "www.secsupport.com", a reseller for Directi's PublicDomainRegistry.com.

The website is hosted on the IP, 75.126.169.149, hosted by SoftLayer.com, right here in the USA.

The tool has a pull-down menu, allowing the user to choose whether he wants to attack "www.muhammadture.com", "www.drawmuhammadday.com", or "www.facebook.com".

Their website claims they have 34,306 people actively attacking with their tool at this time. The organizers, using the email "info@virtualjihad.net", claim to be reachable via MSN, GoogleTalk, or Skype as well as email.