On the eve of the fateful day, April 7th, the collective of Anonymous launched a massive cyber attack against the state of Israel as part of the campaign started in the last months and named #OpIsrael.
The hacktivists are conducting a massive call to army to recruit new forces and inform all the members of collective of the cyber attack planned against Israeli network infrastructures.
The hacktivists protest against Israeli bombing of Palestinian territory expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people condemning Israeli Government and its decisions.
The hackers motivated to The Hackers Post website their participation with following statement:
“Israel isn’t stopping human rights violations. It’s to show solidarity with newly recognized Palestinian state.” “the hacking teams have decided to unite against Israel as one entity…Israel should be getting prepared to be erased from the internet.”
Anonymous has promised to ‘erase Israel from the internet’ in a coordinated and massive cyberattack planned on April 7th, the Holocaust Memorial Day that occur on 27 Nisan (April/May) to remember the event happened during the summer of 1942 when about 300,000 Jews were deported from Warsaw to Treblinka.
Following the message posted by Anonymous collective states:
“To the government of Israel: You have NOT stopped your endless human right violations. You have NOT stopped illegal settlements. You have NOT respected the ceasefire. You have shown that you do NOT respect international law,” the group of hackers also published a video on YouTube video renewing accusations against Israeli government that menaced to shut down the internet in Gaza. “When the government of Israel publicly threatened to sever all internet and other telecommunications in and outside of Gaza, they crossed a line in the sand,”.
The menace is creating considerable apprehension among the Israeli authorities, majority of the main hacktivist cells has already confirmed the adhesion, most of them in the past have been guilty of attacks on government organizations and offices, Israel Government is very concerned and is organizing its defense to mitigate the offensive.
Director of online webpage Accessible Government, Ben Avi, reported to Haaretz website:
“what distinguishes this plan when compared to previous attacks is that it really seems to be organized by Anonymous-affiliated groups from around the world in what looks like a joining of forces.”
Let’s remember that during last initiatives related to #OpIsrael campaign around 700 Israeli websites have been hit including high-profile government systems such as Israeli President’s official website and the Foreign Ministry. Official sources of Israel State reported around 44 million unique attacks on government websites, principal websites of the country suffered DDoS attacks and hacker also obtained personal data related to Israeli officials.
Israel Government is preparing the defense alerting managers of principal infrastructures of the country, Deputy Information Security Officer Ofir Cohen confirmed with an e-mail sent to Knesset ISP employees that government websites are expected to face distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and attempts at vandalism.
“The estimations are that [the cyber-attacks] will reach an unusual level that we have never seen before,”
The Information Security Department of the Knesset is working to put in place all necessary measure to mitigate the attacks and protect information stored on principal government networks.
The battlefield is not only represented by companies’ networks and government network assets, every machine exposed on the internet is a possible target of the hacktivists and its impairment could advantage further attacks, a large scale campaign needs also the participation of a huge quantity of compromised machines.
I suggest to the readers the analysis proposed by AnalysisInetelligence, it sustains that the attacks against Israel could be supported by state-sponsored attackers. AnalysisInetelligence web site states:
“We recently reported on the revival of Operation Israel (#OpIsrael) being coordinated by a group of hackers aligned with Anonymous. The excellent information security blog Voice of Grey Hat subsequently detailed some of the known or suspected locations of participating entities: ”The coalition of hackers appears to have ties to the Iranian government, Pakistan, Syria, Egypt, and the terror group Hezbollah, according to a report published by Cryptome.: ”
“The attributions are to the best of our knowledge, based on language analysis, history and helps from our sources who speak Arabic ( various forms ) and Farsi ( various forms, mostly Persian ) natively:
- AnonGhost ( distributed – freelance )AnonymousPal ( U.S and E.U – freelance )
- OsamaTheGod ( false flag )
- Teamr00t ( Pakistan – ideological )
- Hannibal ( Anti-OPISRAEL , inside fight , Indian – freelance )
- PunkBoyinSF ( Egyptian ties – freelance )
- Mauritania HaCker Team ( distributed – freelance )
- ajax Team ( unknown )
- MLA – Muslim Liberation Army ( ties to Pakistan )
- Gaza Hacker Team ( Palestinians in U.S and E.U , perhaps some members in Arab countries as well )
- Gaza Security Team ( same )
- Gaza Security Team ( ties to Syria – Syrian nationals – freelance )
- Algerian Hacker ( unknown )
- Iranian Cyber Army ( Iran , hired hackers based in Iran )
- Remember Emad ( Joint Lebanese and Iranian effort – high likely state-backed )
- Parastoo ( Iranian , reported to have ties with IRGC-QF and Hezbollah )
- Syrian Electronic Army ( reported to be controlled by elements of pro-Hezbollah activists )
Our analysis to the moment shows not much of coordination between these groups contrary to the popular belief and the sum of human resources all together to the best of our current analysis is not more than 50 individuals. The collectives with Arab leanings are not much advanced, have ties with residents of European and U.S and they are mostly relay on Dumps and Botnets. The teams with Pakistani, Syrians and Lebanese members are more advanced and reported to have ties with governments. Iranian teams are just using the situation to harm Israel and U.S interests and reported to be directly funded by IRGC and MOIS, the Iranian Intelligence.
The risk that behind the attacks there is also the support of hostile governments is high but I exclude that the attacks have been planned with this specific intent … historically Anonymous fights for defense of human rights and free access to Internet. My principal concern is related to the possible infiltration operated by state sponsored hackers that could benefit of the large scale attack to hide their operations and increase the powerful of the cyber offensive.
Pierluigi Paganini, Editor-in-Chief, CDM
April 6, 2013, 10:30am EST
