REPORT: Hackers target Israeli websites

A weekend cyber-attack 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.                   

Yitzhak Ben Yisrael, of the government's National Cyber Bureau, said hackers had mostly failed to shut down key sites.                                                  

Posters using the name of the hacking group Anonymous had warned they would launch a massive attack on Israeli sites in a strike they called (hash)OpIsrael starting April 7.    

Meanwhile, a video circulated on Youtube, where the Anonymous group assumed responsibility of the hacking which targeted Israeli websites.              

However, some say that this video is “completely fabricated”, noting that the original video’s script is related to the American economy. They claimed that racist and inciting statements have been added to the video dubbed in Arabic.              

Others say that Israel is behind the making of the video in an attempt to show that the Arabs hate Jews, not the Israelis, pointing out that the aim of the video is to mobilize world public opinion against the hackers who were accused of having only racist motives.              

Hackers have tried before to topple Israeli sites.                     

In January last year, a hacker network that claimed to be based in Saudi Arabia paralyzed the websites of Israel's stock exchange and national airline and claimed to have published details of thousands of Israeli credit cards.                             

A concerted effort to cripple Israeli websites during November fighting in Gaza failed to cause serious disruption. Israel said at the time that protesters barraged Israel with more than 60 million hacking attempts.                        

An official of the militant Hamas movement that rules the Gaza Strip 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.


AP/LBCI


To watch the full report, please click on the video above