Israel Hit by Huge Cyberattack

The Israeli government on Sunday said it has been hit with more than 44 million cyberattacks since it began aerial strikes on Gaza last week. Anonymous, the hacker collective, claimed responsibility for taking down some sites and leaking passwords because of what it calls Israel's "barbaric, brutal and despicable treatment" of Palestinians.



 "The war is being fought on three fronts," Carmela Avner, Israel's chief information officer, said on Sunday in a press release. "The first is physical, the second is the world of social networks and the third is cyberattacks.

Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz ... said in the past four days, Israel had "deflected 44 million cyber attacks on government websites". Photo: Getty Images

Israel regularly fights off hundreds of hacking attempts every day, but nothing on the scale of the recent torrent of attacks.

The online group Anonymous and other protesters have barraged Israel with more than 60 million hacking attempts, according to the finance minister, Yuval Steinitz.

"The attackers are attempting to harm the accessibility of Israel's government websites on an ongoing basis. When events like the current operation occur, this sector heats up and we see increased activity. Therefore, at this time, defending the governmental computer systems is of invaluable importance."

Anonymous - the multifaceted movement of online rebels and self-described "hacktivists," spearheaded the campaign against Israel, distributing press releases and videos denouncing what it described as an "insane attack" against Gaza. The cyber onslaught began after Israel launched airstrikes against Gaza last week following persistent rocket fire.

Ronen Kenig, a Radware analyst, said the flow of rogue traffic wasn't as powerful as attacks that hit the U.S. banking sector two months ago.

"In terms of the amount of traffic, it's not massive," he said, explaining that the attackers were yet to draw on networks of infected computers – known as botnets – to mount their attacks. Botnets are amassed by hackers and can grow to include thousands of compromised computers, giving them much more firepower than a few dozen online activists acting in tandem.

A post on an Anonymous Twitter feed Monday morning said another set of hackers had defaced the Israeli versions of several Microsoft websites, including Bing, MSN and Skype. Visitors to Bing's Israeli site on Monday morning saw an anti-Israel rant instead of a search-engine homepage.

 A page associated with Anonymous also posted a new threat: "November 2012 will be a month to remember for the (Israel Defense Forces) and Internet security forces. Israeli Gov. this is/will turn into a cyberwar."

 "While the Israeli government almost certainly has backups of the aformentioned databases, these attacks as well as the defacements show Anonymous isn't just doing its usual spree of overloading target sites," writes another tech blog, TheNextWeb.

 "Anonymous' attacks, of course, hardly register compared with the physical damage inflicted by both sides in the Gaza conflict," he wrote.