Anonymous group hacks Israeli government websites under "Operation: Save Gaza"
I’m quite sure that all of you have a slight idea of what’s currently going on in Gaza (unless you’ve been living under a rock, in which case you should probably get informed about it- a quick Google search will update you on the events). It’s not a surprise that the hacktivist group Anonymous has stepped into the war in its own way, by taking down Mossad’s official website (Mossad is the Israeli intelligence agency) among with several other Israeli government websites.
#OpSaveGaza
One Twitter account related to Anonymous posted a tweet claiming responsibility for the takedown of Mossad’s website. The attack was quite powerful, since 2 days have passed and it’s still not back up again. To achieve this result, Anonymous used their signature move- a DDOS attack (Distributed Denial Of Service)- in a simple words, it’s like drowning the server with too many requests.
This action was not the only one that Anonymous performed against Israeli government websites during the recent events which resulted in the loss of hundreds of lives, including the death of a member of the group itself. Israel’s Ministry of Defense and Tel Aviv’s Police websites are two of the thousands of websites that were taken down throughout the operation.
A few days ago, the group uploaded a video in YouTube in which they blame Israel’s government for this slaughter and ask for individual elite hackers to join them in their effort to perform massive attacks in official Israeli websites. During this cyber-war, hundreds of Israeli homepages have had their contents replaced with text, graphics and audio-files by Anonymous hackers.
“We are calling upon the anonymous collective, and the elite hacker groups to join our crusade, and to wage cyber war against the state of Israel once more.”
You can watch the video below:
The full transcript is available here.
Apart from Anonymous, there are other hacktivist groups who are involved in this cyber war. For example, SEA (Syrian Electronic Army) hacked Israel’s Defence Force Twitter account yesterday. As you can see, it’s not just Anonymous who are fighting here. Don’t forget that behind the scenes there might be more groups (or individuals) who may have more reasons to get involved in the cyber-war (hint: funded and potentially government-linked groups).
But let’s just hope that everything ends soon and with no more civilian casualties.