Israel under hack attack.
Date: Thursday, April 18th Source: Iafrica.com
Israel has its fair share of problems to worry about these days, not least of which is the fact that since September 2000 they have been victim of sustained cyber attacks by pro-Palestinian hackers. As the violence gets worse, the hacking activity increases.
You may remember the Chinese-American hacking war that erupted last year following the spy plane incident, in which hackers from the two countries squared off on the cyber battlefield, causing millions of dollars in damage. Israel is facing a similar war over its perceived injustices to the Palestinian people, only at the moment it's a pretty one-way affair.
According to a report published on BBC Online, security firm mi2g claims that the biggest victim of web defacements over the last three years has been the .il domain, which is the country domain for Israel. In this time Israel has suffered 548 of the 1295 cyber attacks in the Middle East, and as their aggressive military moves increase the attacks get more frequent.
In the last two weeks alone Israel has been the victim of two-thirds of all major defacements in the Middle East, which roughly corresponds with the start of their military incursions into the West Bank. Their vulnerability is further heightened by the fact that Israel has the most Internet connections in the Middle East, with 2.4 million connections. This is far more than any of the 22 Arab nations in the region.
The hacking activity has been limited to web site defacements and denial-of-service (DOS) attacks on Israeli web servers, in which the server is flooded with requests, causing it to overload and crash. And according to Peter Sommer, a senior fellow at the Computer Security Research Centre at the London School of Economics, they should be thankful - the damage could get a lot worse.
"It is entirely feasible to mount an attack on critical national infrastructure," he told the BBC Online.
"From a pro-Arab point of view it would be far more effective than sending in a suicide bomber."
The start of the hacking effort against Israel appears to have emanated from an Egyptian group, who began hacking Israeli websites just days after the September 11 attacks.
But they face strong competition from a group of Pakistani hackers calling themselves GForce Pakistan, who have not limited themselves to attacks on Israel alone - they hacked a server belonging to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency just after 09/11, and have since threatened to target US and British military sites, claiming they would not do so if the US withdrew from Saudi Arabia and ceased their bombing of Afghanistan.
According to the chief executive of mi2g, DK Matai, cyber warfare such as this is a good barometer for political tensions around the world.
"The tense situation in the Middle East is reflected in both covert and overt hack attacks," he told the BBC.
Not that one would need a hacking war to see what the problems in the world are - just watch and listen, make some clever assessments of the situation, and you're sorted.
I just find it interesting that computer geeks who know their way around the dark pathways of the hacking world are increasingly emerging as political activists, although it makes sense - there is no better way to get your cause heard than via the Internet.
Not that hacking and defacing is necessarily the best option - the Chino-American hacking war did nothing more than occupy a bunch of geeks for a few weeks, causing a few million dollars' worth of damage which stretched the resources of insurance companies, who deserve to be hit for indecent sums of money considering that they are, in fact, the new Antichrist.
But that's best left for another rant.
