Inside Cyber Warfare - Jeffrey Carr [16]
The second time occurred on February 13, 2009, three days after close parliamentary elections in which Kadima and Likud both claimed victory and hackers targeted the Kadima site as a result of the expected spike in traffic. Gaza Hacker Team claimed responsibility for the second defacement.
Ehudbarak.org.il (This URL is no longer active.)
Israeli Defense Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s website was defaced by Iranian hackers who call themselves Ashianeh Security Team. The group left a message in English reading “ISRAEL, You killed more than 800 innocent civil people in gaza. Do you think that you won’t pay for this? Stop War. If you don’t we will continue hacking your important sites.”
http://www.102fm.co.il/
Hackers left images from Gaza, a graphic of burning US and Israeli flags, and a message calling for Israel to be destroyed on this Radio Tel Aviv website.
Defacements of Israeli portals associated with the following multinational companies or product lines were also defaced: Skype, Mazda, McDonald’s, Burger King, Pepsi, Fujifilm, Volkswagen, Sprite, Gillette, Fanta, Daihatsu, and Kia.
Overview of Perpetrators
Judging from the graffiti left behind on defaced websites, the most active hackers are Moroccan, Algerian, Saudi Arabian, Turkish, and Palestinian, although they may be physically located in other countries. Applicure Technologies, Ltd., an Israeli information security company, claims that some of the hackers are affiliated with Iranian organizations, as well as the terrorist group Hezbollah. So far, however, neither the messages left behind on defaced sites nor conversations among hackers on their own websites explicitly indicates membership in Hezbollah or other Islamist groups. The hackers involved do not have any unifying body organizing their activities, although some of them congregate in certain specialized hacker forums.
Many active hackers during the current Gaza crisis are experienced. Some of them were involved in the Sunni-Shiite cyber conflict that intensified in the fall of 2008. Others have numerous apolitical hacks under their belts. Their participation in the current, politically motivated hacking of Israeli websites is a reflection of their personal political feelings and/or recognition of the increased attention that they can attract with Gaza-related hacks.
The majority of the graffiti left behind on Israeli websites contains images of the victims and destruction in Gaza and exhortations to Israel and/or the United States to stop the violence. The most common motivation of the hackers appears to be to draw attention to the plight of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and to register their protest against Israeli actions there. In the words of two hackers interviewed by a Turkish newspaper, “Our goal is to protest what is being done to the innocent people in Gaza and show our reaction. The reason we chose this method was our bid to make our voices louder.”
Motivations
The imagery and text left on defaced websites suggests the importance the hackers place on sending messages to Israeli or Western audiences through their attacks. The owner of a Palestinian graphic design company designed images for hackers to use in their defacements. A hacker forum even held a competition to see who could come up with the best designs to leave on Israeli websites, with monetary rewards for the winners.
Investigations into the hackers’ motivations have revealed the following:
Inflicting financial damage to Israeli businesses, government, and individuals
A message on the Arabic hackers’ site Soqor.net exhorted hackers to “Disrupt and destroy Zionist government and banking sites to cost the enemy not thousands but millions of dollars. ...”
Delivering threats of physical violence to an Israeli audience
One Moroccan hacker’s team posted symbols associated with violent Jihadist movements and an image of an explosion, along