Ok. Not really. But a lot of what you read may just be hype. Over the last couple days, quite a few readers asked us about our opinion regarding the "cyber jihad" that's supposed to start on November 11th. Couple reasons we think this is not going to be an issues:

• the site calling for it has tried to do so before without success
• November 11th is also the official start of carnival, at least in germany, and a day for hoaxes
• Even if something is going to happen, I doubt it will be more then a lame DoS attack

So in short: stay calm, focus on best practices and you don't have to do anything special on November 11th. If your systems are secure, they will be fine. If they are not secure, then they will get hacked no matter if its 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.

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Johannes B. Ullrich, Ph.D.
Chief Research Officer, SANS Technology Institute.