General

Anonymous hacks Israeli websites, threatens to ‘wipe Israel off the map of the Internet’

Attacks did little real damage, officials claim

JacobDavis/Flickr

A few days after hacking North Korean state websites, Anonymous is at it again and this time its target is Israel.

Over the weekend, the online hacking group claimed that it had gained access to Israeli websites and said that it would “wipe Israel off the map of the Internet.” The sites affected included the Israel Police, the Prime Minister’s Office, the Israel Securities Authority, the Immigrant Absorption Ministry, and the Central Bureau of Statistics. It also took credit for the country’s defence site being offline, reports CNET.

The hackers documented their actions under the Twitter account @Op_Israel and on a Tumblr blog.

The group also claimed to hack 19,000 Israeli Facebook accounts, but a list of those accounts was not released, reports Haaretz.

Yitzhak Ben Yisrael, of the Israeli government’s National Cyber Bureau, said the hacks did not cause lasting damage, telling reporters: “So far it is as was expected, there is hardly any real damage. 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.”

Shlomi Dolev, an expert on network security and cryptography at Ben Gurion University, told The Associated Press that most of the attacks appeared to be denial of service attacks, where increased traffic to a website causes it to crash.

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