The hacktivist group Anonymous apparently disapproves of Israel’s efforts to defend itself from the Hamas barrage of rockets that have rained down on innocent civilians the last few months. Either that, or they approve of targeting civilians by terrorists.
Hard to say with these folks. They have an eccentric sense of morality and justice — sort of like teenagers, which, of course, is about their level of emotional development.
At any rate, Anonymous hackers have attacked hundreds of Israeli websites causing mischief as well as real damage to government and private sites alike.
When the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) this week began taking military action in the Gaza strip against Hamas (as the IDF announced on Twitter), Anonymous declared its own war as part of #OpIsrael. Among the casualties are thousands of email addresses and passwords, hundreds of Israeli Web sites, government-owned as well as privately owned pages, as well as databases belonging to Bank Jerusalem and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
While the hacktivist group doesn’t appear to be anywhere near satisfied yet, the YourAnonNews account, which has over 686,000 followers, did just send out this message:
Israel, all your base are belong to us.
If that’s not a declaration of success, I don’t know what is. There have so far been hundreds of takedowns of sites by Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks; one Pastebin trying to list them all includes 659 Web sites. Not all of them are still down, but some are, and others are still defaced.
Another AnonPaste includes 2,004 email addresses, the majority of which appear to have corresponding passwords, allegedly stolen from an MySQL database belonging to dirotmodiin.co.il, a site for finding real estate in Israel. Many of them are hosted on Israeli domains, but there are also the usual Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo accounts.
Yet as already mentioned, we’re talking about more than just DDoS attacks that are overloading Web sites, such as tel-aviv.gov.il, the municipal site for the second most populous city in Israel (after Jerusalem). There are also plenty of defacements, and, as of a few minutes ago, databases have also been wiped.
Prior to Israel’s air strikes against Hamas which began on Wednesday, more than 850 rockets had been launched from Gaza into Israel this year by terrorists seeking to kill innocent civilians. In the 48 hours leading up to the attacks on Gaza, more than 200 rockets alone were fired.
Nice company you’re keeping there, Anonymous.
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