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#OpUSA Fails Miserably But Succeeds in Uniting Israeli and US Cyber-Defenders

#OpUSA Fails Miserably But Succeeds in Uniting Israeli and US Cyber-Defenders

As expected, the #OpUSA campaign planned by hackers against US websites on May 7th turned out to be nothing more than mostly hot air.  All the promises to “wipe the US off the cyber map” resulted in a small number of annoyance defacements, many of them not even connected with the US.

From USA Today:

“This does not seem to be a very well-coordinated effort and seems to be a disparate group of individual hackers who are probing and looking for web apps that have vulnerabilities,” says Marty Meyer, president of Corero Network Security. “There is also a good possibility that the attacks are only loosely linked to Anonymous in order to generate attention.”

After posting a list of targets, the collective of hackers largely missed the mark on their objectives.

“The fact that so many commercial and government institutions were named on the list is also an indicator that the attacks are not focused,” says Meyer. “There did not seem to be much preparation.”

The result is largely in line with what a previously issued Homeland Security memo predicted, in which the planned attacks were expected to “mostly consist of nuisance-level attacks against publicly accessible webpages and possibly data exploitation.”  The memo also indicated that media attention was likely more the objective of the hackers’ threats.

The #OpUSA campaign ended in much the same way as did #OpIsrael a few weeks ago.  Few sites during #OpIsrael were actually affected for more than a few minutes, if at all.  And during #OpIsrael, it was not uncommon to see previous data leaks being falsely touted as new leaks associated with the #OpIsrael campaign. Many on Twitter pointed out similar tactics during #OpUSA.

But had we needed it, Israeli hackers had pledged their support to Americans in defending against #OpUSA.

As the Times of Israel reported:

Meanwhile, Israeli hackers promised to fight alongside American cyber-defenders, if the need should arise. The Israel Elite Hacker team, formed in the wake of #OpIsrael, has been active since that mostly-unsuccessful operation, and reports daily on its Twitter feed of new sites in the Arab and Muslim world that it has hacked. “This is a message from the Jewish Nation to our friends in the #USA,” the group said. “Although we have cowards for leaders, we take care of our friends!” The Israeli hacker team was at the disposal of any American hacker group that wanted to fight back against the Anonymous hackers during #OpUSA.

While #OpUSA largely failed in causing any notable disruptions, hackers also didn’t even garner all that much media attention.  In the end though, they did succeed at one thing – uniting white hat hackers and cyber-defenders in the US and in Israel in solidarity.

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Comments

Juba Doobai! | May 10, 2013 at 10:08 am

The Israel Elite Hacker team, formed in the wake of #OpIsrael, has been active since that mostly-unsuccessful operation, and reports daily on its Twitter feed of new sites in the Arab and Muslim world that it has hacked.

ROFLMAO! Payback’s a bitch.

#OpUSA / #OpIsrael operatives do doubt are graduates of the University of North Korea having matriculated in B3 – Blusterous Bloviation & Buffooncation.