Iraq's Got Savvy, But No Computers

A story in USAToday outlines just what the new Iraq government is up against as it tries to fight al-Qaeda and other insurgent hackers trying to steal sensitive information stored on government computers. ("The head of Iraq's newly formed cybercrimes division, sits in a borrowed office, at a borrowed desk, working on a laptop borrowed from one of his subordinates," the article begins.)

But there is one sign of hope, as reported deeper in the article:

In May, an innocuous pop-up window flashed onto the screen of an employee at the Ministry of Interior, [Maj. Ahmed] Khathem says. The window asked if he wanted to install updates to his computer.

Had he clicked "OK," he would have given a hacker who calls himself the "Iraqi Hacker" access to reams of sensitive data, including e-mails and addresses of the ministry's thousands of security officers.

"If that information had fallen into the hands of terrorists, it would have been a catastrophe," says Lt. Alaa Hussein, another member of the ministry's anti-hacking team.

Fortunately, the employee was savvy enough to alert the cybercrimes division.

Many computer users (not an insignificant number either) click OK when faced with such a choice, unwittingly launching an attack, government security professionals say.

But Iraq needs more than savvy to fight hackers. With 12 computer science graduates recently added to the cybercrime division and only one borrowed computer among them all, "we couldn't do anything," says one grad.