Hours after anti-Israel hackers said they would strike the websites of the Tel Aviv
Stock Exchange and El Al, both sites were taken offline overnight on Monday.
The Tel Aviv Stock Exchange website made a swift recovery and
was back online by Monday morning, but the El Al website remained unavailable
into the morning.
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The prominent hacker 0xOmar, who has been at the
forefront of an Internet assault on Israel, and who released tens of thousands
of Israeli credit card numbers last month, sent an email to
The Jerusalem Post
before the attack.
He said he had been joined by a hacking team called
"Nightmare." The new group "promised to take down" the two websites by morning,
he added.
El Al released a statement saying it was aware that "a cyber
war has been waged against the State of Israel for two weeks. El Al is closely
monitoring the activities of the Saudi hacker [0xOmar]." El Al said steps being
taken to fortify its official website "could cause disruptions to the website's
activities." Both websites supply key information to members of the public, and
their attack represents an escalation in the web war being waged against
Israel.
Israeli hackers have
said in recent days that they will launch
their own attacks against Arab hackers in the event of future hacking incidents
against Israelis.
Meanwhile, a Jewish pro-Israel hacker named Hannibal published information enabling web users to break into the accounts of 20,000 Arab Facebook users.
Hannibal said he held information that would allow for the breaking in to 10 million Iranian and Saudi bank accounts, and threatened to cause billions of dollars worth of damages.