More than 44 million hacking attempts have been made on Israeli government web sites since Wednesday when Israel began its Gaza air strikes, the government said on Sunday.
Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz said just one hacking attempt was successful on a site he did not want to name, but it was up and running after 10 minutes of downtime.
Typically, there are a few hundred hacking attempts a day on Israeli sites, the ministry said.
Defence-related sites and those of Israel’s prime minister, president and Foreign Ministry have been targeted.
A ministry spokesman said while the attacks have come from around the world, most have been from Israel and the Palestinian territories.
“The ministry’s computer division will continue to block the millions of cyber attacks,” Steinitz said. “We are enjoying the fruits of our investment in recent years in developing computerised defence systems.”
Steinitz has instructed his ministry to operate in emergency mode to counter attempts to undermine government sites.
Both sides in the Gaza conflict, but particularly Israel, are embracing the social media as one of their tools of warfare. The Israeli Defense Force has established a presence on nearly every platform available while Palestinian terrorists are active on Twitter.
Last month, U.S. Defence Secretary Leon Panetta said cyberspace is the battlefield of the future, with attackers already going after banks and other financial systems. U.S. banks have been under sustained attack by suspected Iranian hackers thought to be responding to economic sanctions aimed at forcing Tehran to negotiate over its nuclear programme.
(Reuters)
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2 Responses
It’s not tens of millions of hackers. It’s a simple DDoS attack coordinated by a couple thousand people. What they do is they reload the website multiple times a second usually with a tool like LOIC until it overloads the server and causes it to slow down and eventually go offline. It’s not an actual hack where the hacker takes over admin on a server, rather a lame attempt by script kiddies to show that they can take websites offline.
Meh.
The article is slightly skewed, although there may have been 44 million hacking attempts, most people don’t even know that they were part of this attack. A hacker can put a bot program on any computer and use it to execute whatever code they write. Anonymous is such a hacking group that would have this ability. I think it’s time the (Mossad)starts hunting down those ip addresses.