Israeli Cyber Warfare: Hackers Create Cyber Havoc On Web Sites – OpEd
By Jim Kouri
Israeli law enforcement officials are complaining of widespread cyber sabotage by hackers who launched a massive cyber-warfare campaign that targets Israeli government web sites, an Israeli police source said on Tuesday.
In a press statement, Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz noted that in recent days there were more than 40 million cyber attacks on government sites identified and thwarted since the start Israel’s retaliation against Islamic terrorists.
The Israeli plan is to stop barrage of rockets’ fired by Palestinian terrorists in the Gaza Strip. According to several sources, the rockets are being fired into Israel by members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).
The vast majority of the cyber attacks were aimed at the sites of the security establishment, the president’s residence, the foreign ministry and the prime minister’s office, the minister’s statement noted.
The Law Enforcement Examiner’s source in Israel could not identify who perpetrated the attacks or from where they originated.
However, the notorious Anonymous, an online activist group, over the weekend said its members have crashed numerous private and public web sites in Israel.
“For far too long, Anonymous has stood by with the rest of the world and watched in despair the barbaric, brutal and despicable treatment of the Palestinian people in the so-called ‘occupied territories’ by the Israeli army,” the radical group said in a vitriolic statement.
Cyber security has become a national priority in Israel, and the government and security agencies are working to identify vulnerabilities in the nation’s critical systems, including digital networks used in banking, energy production and other civilian infrastructure. Israel’s National Cyber Bureau was created in January, 2012, to work on cybersecurity and countering cyber-terrorism, according to a National Police detective.
“Anonymous claims its hackers are people all over the world, who are “fighting” for freedom of expressing your own opinion and more. Yet they attack web sites belonging to organizations with whom they do not agree. Freedom-loving people? I think not,” said cyber security specialist Joseph Landgren.
