International Hackers to Target Israel on April 7

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/international-hackers-to-target-israel-on-april-7/2013/04/03/

By Dr. Andre Oboler
The Jewish Press
April 3rd, 2013

The first news of a planned new cyber attack against Israel , scheduled for 
April 7, 2013, was announced back on March the 11th, almost a full month 
earlier. The attack is a face saving effort to renew a campaign from last 
November, which was nothing less than a miserable failure. The previous 
campaign saw more than 44 million attacks by Anonymous on Israeli government 
servers, yet in the end only one server was noticeably impacted, and it just 
went a little wobbly under the increased load.

Given their past failure, a bit more can be expected from the new attack. The 
Times of Israel reports that the 100 largest websites in the country, including 
banks, credit card companies, and communications firms, are said to be 
targeted. This, of course, is nothing new. These days they are all routinely 
targeted. My own analysis uncovered a list of more than 1,350 specific targets, 
including research organizations like NGO-Monitor, human rights organizations 
like the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and even the Histadrut trades 
union. The list also includes the Prime Minister’s Office, Finance Ministry, 
Foreign Ministry, the Judiciary, Health Ministry, Trade Ministry, and the 
Knesset. In addition to 110 government servers, the list includes 318 academic 
servers, 582 company websites, and 448 organizations.

Given past experience, the government servers and most of the companies and 
academic servers would likely stand up to even a severe distributed 
denial-of-service attack. Such “actions” are becoming almost routine. The real 
impact will likely be felt by human rights organizations and civil society 
organizations that rely on cheap, shared hosting and will likely go off line 
temporarily if they come under attack. The more serious risk, however, comes 
from the real hackers, rather than these script kiddies. The new attack has a 
number of named hacker and groups with past reputations listed as supporting 
it. In fact, this new attack seems to be bringing together more groups than 
ever before.

More than a year ago, I warned that Iran was impersonating Anonymous in an 
effort to turn it on Israel. Evidence from Facebook show that a number of 
specific hacking groups behind the April 7th threat are Iranian backed and some 
are thought to have Iranian state sponsorship. These groups include the Iranian 
Cyber Army, Remember Emad (a joint project in Lebanon, with state backing) and 
Parastoo (which reportedly has ties to IRGC-QF and Hezbollah ). In the case of 
Parastoo, direct mention is made of psychological warfare and of efforts to 
advertise the attack in advance with the aim of spreading chaos and pushing 
Israeli actors into taking preventative action that causes further disruption. 
Given the timing of this new attack, and questions over what Obama and 
Netanyahu agreed on during the recent Presidential visit, one has to wonder at 
the timing of this new attack.

[...]

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