Israeli hackers said they brought down the official websites of the Saudi
Arabian Monetary Agency and Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange on Tuesday in
retaliation for a denial of service attack on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange the
previous day.
Both websites appeared to be offline following the
announcement by the hackers.
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The Jerusalem Post
that members of the Internet group Israel Defenders were behind the
attack.
They said in a forum message that they acted “because lame
hackers from Saudi Arabia decided to launch an attack against Israeli sites,”
noting the denial of service attacks against TASE and El Al, as well as three
Israeli banks on Monday. They signed their message with the name “IDF Team.” The
hackers warned “this is only the beginning,” saying “there may be disruption to
the [Saudi] government’s stock exchange site” as well.
“If the lame
attacks from Saudi Arabia will continue, we will move to the next level, which
will disable these sites longer term,” they said, adding that the damage could
last for weeks or even months.
Also Tuesday, an Israeli hacker named
“Anonymous 972” published the e-mail details, including passwords, of 89 Saudi
university students.
“Usually we do not like to hurt innocent sites, but
there is now a cyber war, and every war has victims,” the hacker
wrote.
“Every time an Israeli site get[s] hacked, the same thing will
happen to Saudi sites.”
A pro-Israeli hacker named Hannibal published the
details of 30,000 Facebook account holders from Muslim countries. He said he
could publish 10 million bank details and four million credit card companies
belonging to Arab citizens if web attacks on Israel continued. On Monday,
0xOmar, the hacker who claims to be from Saudi Arabia, and who has been behind a
wave of Internet attacks on Israeli sites, told the
Post he did not take the
threat of a retaliatory strike by a network of Israeli hackers
seriously.
“No one from my country would suffer!” he said in an
email.
0xOmar said he would
continue to organize cyber attacks on Israeli
sites until the government apologized for what he described as a “genocide
against Palestine.”