by Ilan Gattegno, News Agencies and Israel Hayom Staff
A group of Israeli hackers take control of the website belonging to Anonymous, the organization behind the largest cyberattack ever against Israel, and insert pro-Israel content • Cyberattack expected to fully commence at 6 p.m. Israel time.
In the cyber trenches.
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Photo credit: Getty Images  |
A weekend cyberattack campaign targeting
Israeli government websites failed to cause serious disruption,
officials said Sunday. The attacks followed warnings in the name of the
hacking group Anonymous that it was launching a massive attack.
The wide-ranging cyberattack was scheduled to
officially begin at 6 p.m. Israel time. According to the Internet hacker
group Anonymous, it would be the largest cyberattack ever against the
Jewish state.
Yitzhak Ben Yisrael, of the government's National Cyber Bureau, said the hackers had mostly failed to shut down key sites.
"So far it is as was expected, there is hardly
any real damage," Ben Yisrael said. "Anonymous doesn't have the skills
to damage the country's vital infrastructure. And if that was its
intention, then it wouldn't have announced the attack ahead of time. It
wants to create noise in the media about issues that are close to its
heart."
Thousands of private Facebook accounts were also hacked as of Sunday.
Israeli hackers, meanwhile, have already
returned fire, breaching opisrael.com, the site where members of
Anonymous report about their anti-Israel activities, and altered its
contents to make them pro-Israel.
Ronni Bahar of the Avnet Security Consulting
firm said that the hacking of the site was a moral victory in and of
itself: "We are witness mainly to the build-up of tensions and power
struggles between Israeli hackers and those affiliated with Anonymous.
We can tell of directives given to employees to alter their email
passwords. Many organizations have uploaded their sites to cloud
servers."
Alon Mantzur, CEO of 2Bsecure of the Matrix
Group, added that Israeli preparedness today is "better than it was a
year ago in all areas."
The cyberattack is liable to prevent access to
hacked sites, and infect them with viruses and Trojan horses. The
Israel National Cyber Bureau advised large institutions to block
overseas access to their websites. According to speculation, the
cyberattack will focus on well-known websites and will try to shut down
services they provide the public, which the hackers hope will raise
awareness of the attack and cause panic.
For a list of the websites targeted for attack a group calling itself "Team Danger Hackers (#OpIsrael)" click here.
The Israel Defense Forces was also preparing
its cyber defenses, announcing that the Telecommunications Branch has
run a diagnostics check on all of its systems and also simulated various
attack scenarios in order to test its preparedness.
On Saturday, the Israel Securities Authority
website was downed, but its sister financial reportage site, Maya,
remained unaffected. The ISA site was up and running again Sunday
morning. Sites affiliated with the Absorption Ministry, the Intelligence
and Atomic Energy Ministry and others were also attacked.
Israel's Bureau of Statistics was down on
Sunday morning but it was unclear if it had been hacked. Israeli media
reports said the sites of the Defense and Education Ministry as well as
banks had come under attack the night before but they were mostly
repelled.
Hackers also exploited holes in the cyber protection for dozens of small businesses.
One of the sites already hacked belongs to the
Larger than Life organization, which also help Muslim children
suffering from cancer. Larger than Life CEO Lior Shmueli said Saturday,
"It's a shame that such a thing is happening to the organization's
website, of all places, which seeks to help every child with cancer
receiving treatment in Israel, without discriminating against religion,
race, sex or nationality."
An official of the terrorist Hamas movement
praised the current attack. "God bless the minds and the efforts of the
soldiers of the electronic battle," Ihab Al- Ghussian, Gaza's chief
government spokesman, wrote on his official Facebook page.
Due to the attack, the software security
company Checkmarx decided to grant free scanning services for site
owners who aren't certain their site is adequately protected. Those
interested can click here.
Ilan Gattegno, News Agencies and Israel Hayom Staff
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=8449
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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