An Arab hacker who has been at the forefront of the recent wave of Internet
attacks on Israel told
The Jerusalem Post on Monday he would continue to strike
key Israeli websites until the government “apologizes for their genocide in
Palestine and Gaza.”
“Yes, I’ll keep... attacking and publishing
everything related to military or credit cards of normal people,” he said in an
e-mail, hours after the websites of the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and El Al were
taken offline.
RELATED:Ayalon: Cyberspace attacks should be treated as terrorismHackers post 1000s of Israeli credit card numbers0xOmar said the two sites were struck by a new team of
hackers calling themselves “Nightmare,” who had answered his call to attack
Israel. Both sites supply important information to members of the public. Three
banks were also attacked later in the day.
All of the affected websites
were targeted by denial of service (DoS) attacks, in which large numbers of
computers infected with “Trojan horses” are ordered to visit a website, thereby
flooding its server with requests and making it unavailable to
others.
DoS attacks do not, however compromise servers.
Trading on
the stock exchange went uninterrupted.
“I want to hurt/harm Israel in any
possible [way],” 0xOmar said by e-mail.
“I’ll DDOS [carry out denial of
service attacks on] important sites, like Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, elal.co.il
and currently we’re DDOSing Bank Massad,” he said, minutes after the bank was
affected by a Web attack.
“I’ll hack Israeli servers and publish their
data, I’ll publish credit cards. Imagine every possible cyber attack, I’ll do
it. There is no end for it, but if Israeli authorities ask for apologize for
their genocide in Palestine and Gaza, I’ll reduce attacks,” the hacker
said.
Asked by the
Post whether he was concerned that Saudi nationals and
other Arabs could be caught up in a retaliatory strike by a network of Israeli
hackers, 0xOmar disregarded the threat, saying, “No one from my country would
suffer!” He dismissed the publication of hundreds of Saudi credit cards by the
Israeli hackers last week as ineffective.
Advising Israeli authorities to
“resign this game,” and claiming that Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon had
threatened him with “death,” 0xOmar said a twoweek deadline he set is
expiring.
“I’m going to win another game! [A] game of hiding and not
being caught by Interpol, Mossad, Dany Ayalon, Israel, etc,” he
wrote.
The Tel Aviv Stock Exchange website made a swift recovery and was
back online by Monday morning, but the El Al website remained unavailable well
into the day.
The airline 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].”
The
company said steps being taken to fortify its official website “could cause
disruptions to the website’s activities.”
The Tel Aviv Stock Exchange
confirmed it was targeted and said it was subject to a denial of service attack,
but stressed that computers that handle trading were not affected.
“There
has been an attack by hackers on the access routes to the [TASE]
website.
The stock exchange’s trading activities are operating normally,”
said Orna Goren, deputy manager of the exchange’s marketing and communications
unit.
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 in damage.
Israel announced in May that it had
set up a government cyber command to secure the country against hacking attacks.
It began operations this month.
A founding member of the cyber unit,
Isaac Ben-Israel, said the country’s most vital systems were already protected,
but that incidents like the ones seen recently will only increase.
“As
long as the systems are not guarded, any hacker anywhere in the world can break
into them and do damage,” Ben-Israel said on Israel Radio. “I believe that, done
right, in a year or two, we will be able to wipe out all these hackers’
threats.”
Cyber warfare is a serious threat to Israel’s security, Public
Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs Minister Yuli Edelstein said on
Monday.
Speaking on a panel at the annual Women’s International Zionist
Organization conference in Tel Aviv, the minister said recent incidents such as
the posting of confidential credit card information belonging to Israelis on the
Web by a hacker were a menace to the country.
“The cyber war against
Israel is very real,” he said.
“It’s not just about writing Jews drink
blood and something like that. It’s an attack on El Al, on its companies and its
people.”
Gil Shefler, Nadav Shemer and Reuters contributed to this
report.