Media Reaction to Hack Attacks Outweighs Real Threat.

As wars go, this one was pretty weak. Earlier this month, groups of Chinese hackers were supposed to be launching an all-out attack against American Web sites to protest the April 1 collision between a Chinese fighter jet and a U.S. spy plane. Sonic media reports made it sound like the Red Army's thick-glasses division would be retaliating for the death of pilot Wang Wei by sending the Internet itself plummeting into the ocean behind him.

But a week into the so-called conflict, it became clear that cyberwar is far from hell. While it's possible that the United States' critical network infrastructure might someday be threatened by overseas hackers, the most dangerous element of this particular attack was the hype.

The first clue that we didn't need to switch to Defcon 4 should have been the names of the groups reported to be carrying Out these attacks. From the silly sounding "Honkers Union" to the more grandiose "Chinese Red Guest Network Security Technology Alliance," they weren't the sort of titles that strike fear in the souls of network security managers.

Perhaps these names sound more menacing in Mandarin. But here's a tip: If a hacker's screen name isn't vaguely Germanic or spelled phonetically with an odd combination of capital letters -- something like dethBoYZ -- there's no real reason to worry.

Media reports suggested that the Chinese hackers would be targeting major government and commercial sites, but most of the damage was done to less-popular pages. The week's most dramatic hack was a "denial of service" flood that shut down the official White House Web site for a couple of hours on May 4. But it wasn't even clear if the Chinese were responsible for that one. And if you've seen the stripped-down White House site since President Bush took over, you know it wasn't much of a loss anyway.

The vast majority of the so-called attacks were simple defacements, where the contents of a Web page are replaced without the owner's permission. It's sort of like digital graffiti but without the messy cleanup. And despite the buildup that accompanied these particular hacks, defacements happen hundreds of times a day without threatening democracy or the values we Americans hold dear.

Well, that's not quite true: These particular attacks seem designed to undermine our production values.

A review of defaced pages archived at www.attrition.org shows that most Chinese hackers favor the tired-but-true motif of black backgrounds and bad English -- just like American hackers. "USA Will Be With Responsibility for the Accident Total!!!" wrote one fellow who defaced a women's health site posted by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. At least this guy was nice enough to post a link to a copy of the original page. Heck, he even apologized: "I am very sorry to replace the page!!"

If this is the sort of war where you hand out medals, I'd give the artistic achievement award to a guy who replaced a site about audio components with a series of photos comparing President Bush to monkeys. The hacked page also features a loving portrait of a grenadehucking Chinese soldier and a request that Americans "try your best to stop U.S. government to destroy the peace of the world."

I would suggest the peace of the world is in no danger from stunts like this. Operators of some sites surely lost some data, and a few thousand Web surfers stumbled onto some oddities on their way to some out-of-the way Web pages. But neither the Chinese attacks nor the half-hearted efforts of some American hackers to retaliate made the sort of history we usually associate with the word "war."

The biggest victim in all this was surely the media, which once again bought into the notion that any sort of threat is magnified in importance by its association with the word "Internet." Some papers called it a cyberwar, but there wasn't any blood spilled in these attacks - just ink.