Saudi Hacker Plays Cat-N-Mouse With Oh-So Serious Foreign Minister – OpEd

By Allison Deger

Al Akhbar English today interviewed the elusive Saudi hacker first known for releasing Israeli credit card information, now notorious for causing a frenzy with Israel’s deputy foreign minister. Politics seem like a footnote, as each step of the way, 0xOmar goads Danny Ayalon, the official, in a game of cat and mouse. Ayalon recently called the hacker a “terrorist.” 0xOmar writes to the Lebanese newspaper:

Danny Ayalon proved his stupidity multiple times. He just talks, ‘We’ll catch, We’ll do, We’ll reply, We We We We’ll.’ Enough said Danny, enough said. You say and I do, You talk and I hack, this is the reality. Wake up, you cannot even find me, I keep publishing and when you talked again, Gaza hackers taught you a lesson, hacked your Homepage and put a shoe on your face. We don’t have anything to say about people who just talk, we act!

In addition to the disclosed credit card information, 0xOmar also lets on that he’s hacked much more, stating he has “sensitive and hidden information … extracted from Israeli servers,” including, “government emails, Jammer and Surveillance device makers data.” The hacker said that he is sitting on the information, waiting for a “good time and a good place to publish.”

However web-savvy 0xOmar may be, I couldn’t help but imagine him as a teenager. In my mind, he is nabbing financial data from a laptop in his bedroom, in between bites from a mid-afternoon snack made by his mother. I see him striking a keyboard on a cluttered desk piled with unfinished homework and DVDs watched more times than birthdays celebrated.

Perhaps I envision this because 0xOmar’s responses to Al Akhbar indicate a juvenile need for approval. Without prompting, he tells the interviewer about how proud his parents are of him. And, there are other flickers of naïve youthfulness. For example, when the newspaper asks if he is “afraid about being caught?” 0xOmar is emblematic of teenager grade confidence:

NEVER! I don’t think about it even for a minute. How can I say to the world that I’m 100% sure that no one can find me? It’s simply impossible!

The hacker’s last taunt, the feet on the face of the deputy foreign minister, carried out by Palestinian hackers.  0xOmar then goes on to aggrandize virtual resistance in his latest public message to Ayalon,  posted by Group XP, a Saudi hacking collective where 0xOmar is also member:

From here, I challenge the world to find me, let’s the game begin. You have 2 weeks. If I come back and post another message after 2 weeks, simply you failed and I won the game.

The hacker is playful, but Ayalon is serious, serious, serious. Read the full interview with Al Akhbar here.

Allison Deger is the Assitant Editor of Mondoweiss.net. Follow her on twitter at @allissoncd.

This article was published at Mondoweiss.net here: http://mondoweiss.net/2012/01/saudi-hacker-interviewed-on-game-of-cat-and-mouse-with-israel.html