There’s a war going on between hackers in the Middle East:
Israeli hackers said they brought down the official websites of Saudi Arabia’s Monetary Agency and Abu Dhabi’s Securities Exchange on Tuesday in retaliation for a denial of service attack on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange the previous day.
Both official websites did appear to be offline following the announcement by the Israeli hackers. An Israeli hacker told The Jerusalem Post that members of the Israel Defenders internet group were behind the attack….
The hackers warned that “this is only the beginning,” adding that “there may be disruption to the [Saudi] government’s stock exchange site” as well.
“If the lame attacks from Saudi Arabia will continue, we will move to the next level, which will disable these sites longer term,” they said, adding that the damage could last “weeks or even months.” The hackers signed their message “IDF Team.”
Also Tuesday, another Israeli hacker named “Anonymous 972” published the email details, including passwords, of 89 Saudi university students. “Usually we do not like to hurt innocent sites, but there is now a cyber war, and every war has victims,” the hacker wrote. “Every time an Israeli site get[s] hacked, the same thing will happen to Saudi sites,” the hacker added.
“We call on Israeli citizens to abide by (the law). Just as the Israeli government has found answers for terrorism, we will find answers to this challenge … we call on Israeli citizens not to … act as vigilantes,” Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said in a statement.
Expect the private hack counter-hack to continue.
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Comments
Their ingenuity and patriotism needs to be directed towards Iran and its nuclear program. Hack away, early and often!
Baruch Hashem.
Is it too much to hope (or am I too much a James Bond fan … but only up to 1971) for some Israeli hacker to figure a way to make Hamas’s rockets explode right before they are to be launched?
LukeHandCool (whose own laptop has been downed by a virus and is using his wife’s infuriating netbook).
I would rather see the Iranian missiles redirected at downtown Tehran.
If a nuke intended for Jerusalem went off in the air above Tehran I would not rejoice.
But I wouldn’t shed any real tears, either.
Good on the IDF hack team! And man up, LukeHandCool.
0. (Afterthought) There’s a war going on between hackers in the Middle East
I cannot rule out that the Israeli and/or Saudi hackers are acting on behalf of their governments in a manner that preserves deniability, but in what follows I presume that they are acting independently:
1. Brilliant, just brilliant. With governments looking for pretexts to rein in the Internet for their own purposes or on behalf of special interests, this is the just what we need from the neener-neener-I’m-so-smart geek set.
2. Brilliant, just brilliant. There is a significant probability that Israel will soon have to act against the existential threat of Iranian nukes. The willingness of Saudi Arabia to at least look the other way could be essential. And here come the see-how-smart-I-am geeks, rumbling into the china shop.
3. The man-child Israeli hackers don’t understand the gravity of what they’re doing & what they might be meddling with. Make a noninflammatory but clear public warning. If the hackers persist, find them and hold them until peace breaks out in the Middle East. (I assume that Israeli government hackers are good enough to track down rogue hackers. I assume the Israelis would be able to put…sequestered…rogue hackers to work without compromising security assets.)
4. Similar considerations hold for the Saudis. Otoh, a busted Saudi hacker would be less likely than an Israeli counterpart to be treated intelligently by his government.
5. obpopulus@January 17, 2012 at 1:20 pm,
The line between patriots and loose cannons can be hard to draw, but I strongly suspect that the Israeli hackers are on the wrong side of it.
It’s the IDF getting back at SA, not some Israeli script kiddies.
You mess with the bull and you get the horns.
I only hope the Israeli hackers next hit the water desalination and sewage treatment plants. A little bit of diarrhea goes a long way where people all gather around the food and eat with their hands.
an eye for a eye …. sweet justice 🙂
it’s about time !!!
Finally, people with balls.
And I love, love, love the idea of hacking into the missile systems to make the rockets explode at ignition.
Making rockets asplode at ignition is cool…but messing with their satellite TV feeds to play XXX movies would be freakin’ hilarious! Hey, Iran! Check out “Behind the Green Door”!