Israel is currently the target of a massive cyber attack, but it managed to limit the damage for now, with a better preparation than last year, announced Sunday the Israeli government and one of the best known computer experts in the country. Today is the Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Anonymous hacker group announced on Saturday an important attack Sunday against Israeli sites, called #OpIsrael, with the goal to “disrupt and erase Israel from cyberspace” in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
The attack affected especially websites of the Prime Minister, Defense and Education ministries, but also the Central Statistical Bureau, but all these sites seem to work normally Sunday. Only the Ministry of Education website was temporarily down due to a technical problem that was fixed, added the same source, without further clarification.
“So far, it is as was expected. There is hardly any real damage assured for the Israel’s Army radio station professor Yitzhak Ben-Israel, founder of a national center against cyber crime, subordinated to Prime Minister’s Benjamin Netanyahu office.
“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 of time. It wants to create noise in the media about issues that are close to its heart,” said Ben-Israel, mentioning that the group seeks rather to revive the debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The hackers claimed to be a part of the Anonymous, but Dr. Tal Pavel of MiddleEasterNet said that the new cyber attack against Israel was most likely coming from a a group of Arab hackers calling themselves “Dangerous Hackers.”
According to Guy Mizrahi, a co-founder of Cyberia, a consulting agency and data protection company, Israeli sites have been subject to a “major attack” for several days.
“Yesterday there was quite a storm, quite a few government sites were hacked and messages were left on some of them, and data was stolen from others,” he told public radio.
The Anonymous group has previously launched an attack in November against numerous Israeli websites and said that it blocked or “emptied” 700 sites in a protest against the Israeli military offensive against Gaza.
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