by Ilan Gattegno and Israel Hayom Staff
Hacktivist group Anonymous says #OpIsrael, meant to "erase Israel from the Internet" in solidarity with the Palestinians, will peak on April 7 • Cybersecurity experts say financial system, government websites are likely to be targeted.
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Israel is bracing for a "potentially
crippling" cyberattack against the country's major companies and
websites, Israel Hayom learned Tuesday. The attack is set to take place
on April 7, which this year will be the eve of Holocaust Remembrance
Day.
The planned assault is part of hacktivist
group Anonymous's ongoing #OpIsrael campaign, which was launched in
March in a show of solidarity with the Palestinians. As part of the
campaign, Anonymous — which has since been joined by several other
hacktivist groups including Sector404 and RedHack — said that on April 7
that it would "launch a coordinated, massive cyberattack on Israeli
targets with the intent of erasing Israel from the Internet."
Last week, the three groups claimed
they breached the Mossad's mainframe, accessed classified information
and leaked the personal details of over 34,000 of the intelligence
agency's officers and agents worldwide online. The Mossad did not
comment on the matter.
According to Shai Blitzblau, CEO of Maglan
Information Defense Technologies Research, the attack is likely to
target government websites as well as major banks and credit cards
companies.
Israel's financial system was targeted in a
series of cyberattacks in early 2012: Two of Israel's major banks,
Hapoalim and Leumi, as well as three major credit card companies —
Isracard, Leumi Card and Visa Cal — were hacked, as was the Tel Aviv
Stock Exchange.
Hackers are also constantly trying to target
Israel's critical infrastructure, such as its power and water grids: In
September 2012, Yiftach Ron-Tal, chairman of the Israel Electric
Corporation's board of directors, revealed that IEC sees between 10,000
and 20,000 attempted cyberattacks a day. Ron-Tal was speaking at the
annual cyber summit, hosted by the Israel Institute for National
Security Studies.
"Cyberattacks worldwide are becoming more
powerful every day, but the [coming] attack won't be substantially
different from what we've seen before," Blitzblau said. "The hackers are
likely to target the top 100 Israeli websites and they will probably
try introducing Trojan horses into their servers, to infect as many
users as possible."
The systems used by the majority of Israel's
banks, credit card and telecommunication companies are susceptible to
denial-of-service attacks that use the availability of virtual
host-servers to create massive traffic backlogs, which eventually crash
the websites using their services.
Meanwhile, the military is also gearing for an
increase in cyberattacks: In mid-February, the Israel Defense Forces
set up an official cyber war room, meant to improve the IDF's ability to
thwart what military sources called "the constant attempts" to hack
into the IDF's computer systems.
The IDF officially defined cyber warfare as the fifth arena of warfare, alongside land, sea, air and space, in 2012.
Ilan Gattegno and Israel Hayom Staff
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=8347
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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