Anonymous Claims 100,000 Israel Site Disruptions

But Israeli government officials dismiss the claim and call the hacktivist groups OpIsrael campaign ineffective.

Anonymous: 10 Things We Have Learned In 2013 (click image for larger view and for slideshow)
Anonymous vowed to erase Israel from the Internet Sunday as part of the hacktivist collectives ongoing Operation Israel (#OpIsrael) campaign, and multiple Israeli government websites, including the defense and education ministries, as well as multiple banking websites, were reportedly disrupted.
A Monday tweet from the
YourAnonNews
channel claimed Hackers Wipe Israel Off Internet. That followed a Sunday
partial damage report
from the #OpIsrael Twitter feed claiming the attacks disrupted over 100,000 websites, 40,000 Facebook pages, 5,000 Twitter accounts and 30,000 Israeli bank accounts, resulting in over $3 billion in damages.
Israeli officials, however, downplayed the effect of the defacement, disruption and data dump – a.k.a. doxing -- attack campaign, which was preannounced for Sunday as part of Anonymous ongoing
Operation Israel
(#OpIsrael).
[ Hackers are making the rounds of countries. Read
Anonymous Hits North Korea Via DDoS
. ]
So far, it is as was expected. There is hardly any real damage, Isaac Ben-Israel, who founded and formerly directed the Israeli governments National Cyber Bureau, told Israels Army Radio.
Anonymous doesnt have the skills to damage the countrys vital infrastructure, he said. And if that was its intention, then it wouldnt have announced the attack ahead of time. It wants to create noise in the media about issues that are close to its heart.
Sunday, not coincidentally, was the annual
Holocaust Remembrance Day
marked by many people in Israel and the United States, among other countries, and not all Anonymous participants agreed with the timing of the latest attacks. Notably, the German branch of Anonymous said via Twitter Saturday that it was
distancing itself from #OpIsrael
, which it said was being mostly run by U.S. Anons.
One
Anonymous news channel
suggested the Sunday attacks were a first-ever attempt by various #OpIsrael operators to coordinate their efforts, and reportedly saw a number of different participants -- operating under such handles as AnonGhost, Gaza Security Team, Parastoo, PunkBoyinSF and
Syrian Electronic Army
-- get involved.
But how much damage did the attacks do? The Anonymous claim of $3 billion in damages was presumably based on
Tel Aviv Stock Exchange fluctuations
-- which over the past month have been mostly downward -- but theres no evidence that the Sunday campaign, including
distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks
, had any effect on the Israeli stock market.
Although the alleged extent of the defacements and disruptions couldnt be verified, some of the related damage reports appear to be vastly overestimated. A tango down
list of disrupted sites
posted to Pastebin on Sunday, for example, included just 14 Israeli government websites, some of which remained unreachable Monday morning, as well as 50 other Israeli sites.
In addition, a group called LatinHackTeam
leaked over 600 accounts
supposedly associated with
Lone Soldier
, which is an Israeli Defense Force website that advertises everything foreign and lone soldiers need to know about joining the Israeli army and volunteering for Israel. The data dump appeared to contain email addresses, hashed passwords and plain-text passwords.
Curiously, however, a claimed
Leumi International Bank Of Israel
dox -- also from LatinHackTeam -- contained mailing addresses for people based not in Israeli, but the United States. Another Pastebin post, meanwhile,
claimed that 280 sites
were defaced by Anon Rogues as part of OpIsrael. A sampling of the sites did reveal defaced pages, although none were hosted in Israeli domains, and few -- if any -- appeared to have overt ties to Israel.
The #OpIsrael attack campaign continued into Monday, with the OpIsrael Twitter feed
claiming to publish the phone number
for the israelien prime ministers wife, referring to
Sara Netanyahu
, the wife of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
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Anonymous Claims 100,000 Israel Site Disruptions