Al-Qa’ida website hosted in Houston, TX
Did you know that Al-Qa’ida has an official website? Unfortunately for Al-Qa’ida, its former webmaster met an untimely demise in Saudi Arabia last month, but their website has been up and down since then under various domains. The site is no joke: “Al Qaeda is said to use this site as a means of communicating with their cells.” I did a little background checking on the web servers providing the hosting and DNS services. Three locations came up: Madinah, Saudi Arabia, Ashburn, VA, and Houston, TX. I’m suprised they didn’t just host it in NYC. For a sample of the content, check out this Free Republic post. Needless to say, a number of web servers in Ashburn, Houston, and Saudi Arabia were hacked last month under not-so mysterious circumstances. (See for yourself: do a WHOIS on islamray.org and faroq.org)
Update: Wired reports that “[The Al-Qa’ida] site is familiar with certain hosting companies, exploiting their security problems and cracking confidential passwords.” I’ve never heard of a “site” that could hack, but I can’t say whether the web hosts in question knew which sites they were (are?) hosting. If you’re wondering whether terrorist groups really have the balls to host their websites in America, I suggest you check out this tutorial on how to shut down a Hamas website.
