Saturday, April 6, 2013

Anonymous Open Third Wave of Cyber Attacks Against Israel

Security experts are treating the hacktivist collective Anonymous` threats to "wipe Israel off the map of the internet" as an annoyance rather than a significant threat to national security. Israel has known about #OpIsrael for more than a month and is well prepared. Twitter search link



The assault by #Anonymous is particularly vile as Israel is searching for ways to defend its citizens - yet again - from ongoing missile barrages launched from northern Gaza; a situation which Anonymous in its legitimization is ignoring altogether. How loathsome can the cyber anarchists get? Tomorrow April 7 marks Israel's Holocaust Memorial Day.

This weekend's cyber attack on government, banks, academic and business websites is a follow-up to a similar attack last November. In response to Israel`s retaliation on the Gaza Strip, Anonymous launched the first #OpIsrael and claimed that within hours "there were thousands of defaces and hacks, databases released or deleted, dozens of disruptions to government sites and more."

The second wave of OpIsrael was initiated a month ago, with a press release addressing the Israeli government in its usual cyborg monotones.

Israel is no stranger to cyber attacks. It faced 44 million cyber attacks since the beginning of its military operation in Gaza. Of all these attacks, just one was partially successful, knocking one website offline for a short period.

The OpIsrael attack is very likely to consist of a series of DDoS attacks, not very sophisticated and aside from potentially knocking websites offline for some time, have little lasting effect on the servers and websites in question.

However an alleged cyber-attack carried out last month could indicate that these groups have more than just DDoS at their disposal. Hacktivists associated with Anonymous, a Turkish group called RedHack and an Arab group call Sector404 declared they had managed to breach the defenses of Mossad and compromized the details of 30,000 secret agents. The veracity of the claim is highly suspect, to say the least.

Strategic sites are protected from the public Internet, and the chances that the hackers can penetrate them are negligible. Over the past weeks, site administrators in government and the private sector have been shoring up their defenses.

It is probably no coincidence the cyber anarchist group is sharing its business model with Al Qaeda. Once again Anonymous has lifted its mask. It is little more than the cyberspace version of terrorism.

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