this just in:

millions of computer-wise people across the globe have joined together as one massive team, known as 'hackers', these computer experts gone bad have threatened to take down the net, and are hitting web hosts around the world millions of times a day

People want to hack websites; it's nothing new, if the net blows up on Sunday, is it more because the number of attacks has risen, or that our server is unpatched?

Come on, guys, let's look at the facts here:

an unknown group of people put a challenge up.

their own website is now down.

hardly anyone knew about this before the reports hit the news.

Put yourself in a hacker's position; would you take this seriously?

Those who are hacking for attention/relief of teenage boredom would, but they won't have the skills to cause any damage, and if they do, the problem is that we've got crap config on the servers.

And those who hack for fun and profit wouldn't be interested in this kind of 'challenge' anyway.

My prediction is a small rise in activity, and maybe a few sites (comparitively) will go down, but nothing like the 30,000 or so that some people are predicting ( http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20030702S0006 )

People are comparing this to the China incidents of 2001, but there's a big difference here; the China hacks weren't a challenge for publicity (or webspace), but fuelled by morality, I don't think it's very useful to compare these two events.

Of course, on the other hand;

With the popularity of hacking in general (Yahoo now has an offical "Hackers' Lounge" Chat room), the numbers of hackers, at varying degrees of skill has greatly increased, and with the appearance of massive hacking software archives like http://neworder.box.sk, where you can download everything from ethereal to AIM password crackers, the amount of technological firepower available at your fingertips is quite astounding, and usually no skill is required to perform the 'hack'.

This is, of course, no revelation, but perhaps an event like the 6th is just something that's been waiting to happen, a time when all the autohackers and canned exploits will come into play in a way we've not seen before, like a simulateous code red, nimda, sircam and everything else that's hit in the last year, imagine if the hackers had had a private network set up, and release all these at the same time, maybe we are going to see something of those proportions on Sunday?

We'll obviously just have to wait and see.

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Link to this comment: http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/articles/6219/20727#20727