MSNBC has news about a hacker attack on al-Qaida’s web com sites.

NBC News: Hacker attack cripples al-Qaida web communications

Digital assault is similar to one last year linked to UK government

WASHINGTON — Computer hackers shut down al-Qaida's ability to communicate its messages to the world through the Internet, interrupting the group's flow of videos and communiqués, according to a terrorism expert.

"Al-Qaida's online communications have been temporarily crippled, and it does not have a single trusted distribution channel available on the Internet," said Evan Kohlmann, of Flashpoint Global Partners, which monitors the group's communications.

This could be the action of government-sponsored hackers.

Kohlmann said the latest incident "once again appears to bear the telltale fingerprints of government-sponsored hackers."

Think about this. Would you want to be the persons trying to repair the al-Qaida outage? Don’t you think the hackers and others are watching who is repairing the outage. It is hard to hide when you are repairing something that has lots of visibility.

This is like flushing out the enemy and setting a trap. If you scare the IT staff too much they don’t repair the site which is a win as well.

Can you imagine the guys trying to figure out how to repair the sites and constantly worried a predator UAV is targeting them?