Vigilante hackers blasted off net

Convicted hacker and recent founder of the YIHAT hacking group, Kim "Kimble" Schmitz, has been forced to close down the anti-terrorism group's website after it was hit by denial of service (DoS) attacks.

The YIHAT website, Kill.net, along with other sites associated with Schmitz, including his personal site Kimble.org and that of his security company, Dataprotect.com, have been inaccessible for days.

The entrepreneurial hacker had drawn a lot of fire as well as respect from the hacker underground with his plans to stamp out terrorism by training up a small cyber army.

But it appears that some members of the underground community more opposed to Schmitz's plan took the matter into their own hands and blasted his websites off the net.

Earlier this month, hacker Fluffi Bunni broke into and defaced Kill.net and Kimble.org, and another hacker went on a defacement spree under the YIHAT banner and damaged the group's already fragile reputation.

Rumour has it that over the last week another rival hacking group, Pakistan-based GForce, threatened to DoS the YIHAT site after it emerged that YIHAT was monitoring the group as part of its investigation into terrorist activity.

An email sent to vnunet by Schmitz, headed "YIHAT Terminates All Public Activities", claims that the group has "successfully completed the first phase of its mission."

The group claims to have gathered a sufficient amount of information to launch the second phase of the YIHAT operation, which is to monitor, infiltrate and take control of the information infrastructure used by or supporting terrorists.

Schmitz also said that the YIHAT site was taken down "to prevent the dissemination of confidential information to those who are not part of the core YIHAT team, and to take away motivation from those who - for good reason! - did not become part of the core YIHAT team from continuing to play around."

"The decision to take Kill.net offline completely is also based on the fact that the additional administrative effort [mainly caused by DoS attacks] has led to an inacceptable situation. YIHAT moves to the underground," he said.