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:
If that’s not a declaration of success, I don’t know what is. There
have so far been hundreds of takedowns and defacements 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.
While the Israeli government almost certainly has backups of the
aformentioned databases, these attacks as well as the defacements show
Anonymous isn’t just doing its usual spree of overloading target sites.
OpIsrael appears to have gotten multiple hackers involved who are
interested in doing actual damage, or at least something that is
slightly more permanent than just a 404.
Update at 8:20PM EST: The Twitter account is now claiming that over 9,000 sites have been taken down or defaced, but don’t be fooled:
this is a meme reference.
Update at 9:00AM on November 17 – Anonymous is claiming to have taken down the Web sites for the
President of the state of Israel and the
IDF’s blog. At the time of writing, the former is still down but the latter is working just fine.
Update at 4:00PM on November 17: Anonymous is
claiming to have taken down a few more sites; here are the ones that
were down or defaced at the time of this update:
Nothing major, but this further shows Anonymous is clearly still at it.
A
press release attempts to explain Anonymous’ motives behind the attacks:
Greetings World
For far too long, Anonymous has stood by with the rest of the world
and watched in despair the barbaric, brutal and despicable treatment of
the Palestinian people in the so called “Occupied Territories” by the
Israel Defense Force. Like so many around the globe, we have felt
helpless in the face of such implacable evil. And today’s insane attack
and threatened invasion of Gaza was more of the same.
But when the government of Israel publicly threatened to sever all
Internet and other telecommunications into and out of Gaza they crossed a
line in the sand. As the former dictator of Egypt Mubarack learned the
hard way – we are ANONYMOUS and NO ONE shuts down the Internet on our
watch. To the IDF and government of Israel we issue you this warning
only once. Do NOT shut down the Internet into the “Occupied
Territories”, and cease and desist from your terror upon the innocent
people of Palestine or you will know the full and unbridled wrath of
Anonymous. And like all the other evil governments that have faced our
rage, you will NOT survive it unscathed.
To the people of Gaza and the “Occupied Territories”, know that
Anonymous stands with you in this fight. We will do everything in our
power to hinder the evil forces of the IDF arrayed against you. We will
use all our resources to make certain you stay connected to the Internet
and remain able to transmit your experiences to the world. As a start,
we have put together the Anonymous Gaza Care Package –
http://bit.ly/XH87C5 – which contains instructions in Arabic and English
that can aid you in the event the Israel government makes good on it’s
threat to attempt to sever your Internet connection. It also contains
useful information on evading IDF surveillance, and some basic first aid
and other useful information. We will continue to expand and improve
this document in the coming days, and we will transmit it to you by
every means at our disposal. We encourage you to download this package,
and to share it with your fellow Palestinians to the best of your
ability.
We will be with you. No matter how dark it may seem, no matter how
alone and abandoned you may feel – know that tens of thousands of us in
Anonymous are with you and working tirelessly around the clock to bring
you every aid and assistance that we can.
We Are Anonymous
We Are Everywhere
We Are Legion
We Do Not Forgive
We Do Not Forget
To the oppressors of the innocent Palestinian people, it is too late to EXPECT US!
Info: