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.
"So far it is as was expected, there is hardly any real damage," Ben Yisrael said. "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 ahead of time. It wants to create noise in the media about issues that are close to its heart," he said.
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 OpIsrael starting April 7.
Israel's Bureau of Statistics was down on Sunday morning but it was unclear if it was hacked. Media said the sites of the Defense and Education Ministry as well as banks had come under attack the night before but they were mostly repelled.Today is the day that "Anonymous" planned to erase Israel from cyberspace.
Judging from their tweets, they have done next to nothing.
They claim a number of sites taken down, but most of them are simply small businesses who seem to be
 |
| This graphic from their page indicates that the pseudo-hackers are Muslim |
Anonymous is also taking credit for taking down the "Israel military site" which is, in fact, an army surplus store. They do seem to have gotten some credit card numbers from that site.
They claim to have leaked "Israel Military Secret Documents" which are simply old articles, some by ITIC, freely available on the Internet.
The hackers seem to have managed to briefly interrupt some sites with denial of service attacks. Other Israeli sites that seem to be down from outside Israel are simply pro-actively blocking all traffic from outside the country in order to continue to serve Israeli customers and readers, so they appear to be down when they are simply being shielded from outside traffic.
On the Israeli side, people are reporting that the main domain of OpIsrael, the group spearheading the hacking effort, was hacked itself by a Zionist hacker. This does not seem to be correct; it looks like some Zionist simply bought the OpIsrael.com domain a couple of days ago and set up the page to appear "hacked" when it was never the webpage of the anti-Israel hackers. This is their page.
UPDATE: Actually, it looks like OpIsrael.com was their site, and they are lying about it now. (h/t David G)