Inside Cyber Warfare - Jeffrey Carr [17]
Using cyber attacks as leverage to stop Operation Cast Lead
Many of the defacements contained messages indicating that attacks on Israeli sites and servers would stop only when Israel stopped its violence in Gaza.
Fulfilling the religious obligation of Jihad
Some hackers couched their activities in religious terms, insisting that cyber attacks were tantamount to fighting Jihad against Islam’s enemies. One hacker wrote, “Use [the hacking skills] God has given you as bullets in the face of the Jewish Zionists. We cannot fight them with our bodies, but we can fight them with our minds and hands. ... By God, this is Jihad.”
Achieving enhanced personal status among the community of hackers or improving one’s personal position in rivalries or competitions with other hackers
Two of the hackers’ websites held contests to encourage productive competition in hacking Israeli sites. Although there is much mutual encouragement and assistance on hackers’ websites, there are also signs of rivalry, with hackers defacing each other’s websites and leaving critical or taunting messages.
Hackers’ Profiles
The following are brief profiles of some of the hackers involved. They were identified by press reports or by the content of hacker websites as being the most active or high-profile hackers in the anti-Israel campaign.
Team Evil
Team Evil gained widespread notoriety for defacing thousands of websites in 2006 in protest of Israel’s military activities in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon. The group defaced more than 8,000 websites between June and November 2006. In addition to Israeli and Western sites, this tally also included websites associated with the governments of China, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia. In all, Team Evil defaced 171 significant websites, according to records on zone-h (http://www.zone-h.org/), a website that serves as an archive of hacker exploits. The team often left anti-Israel or anti-Semitic messages on their defacements, regardless of the country of origin of the website.
Israel’s Ynetnews reported that Team Evil was responsible for the majority of damage to Israeli websites in the first half of 2006, including sites belonging to banks, hospitals, major companies, NGOs, and political parties. When Ynetnews contacted the group, its members told the paper that they were Moroccan hackers who “hack into sites as part of the resistance in the war with Israel.”
The group has resurfaced to take part in the current campaign against Israeli websites, but it is not as active as it was in 2006. Its greatest recent accomplishment was to reroute traffic from Ynetnews, Discount Bank, and other Israeli websites to a page with an anti-Israel message.
The Israeli IT security company Beyond Security released an extensive case study of Team Evil’s 2006 attacks. Its report concluded that Team Evil demonstrated a higher degree of technical skill than typically seen in similar groups. Given the skill and commitment it has previously demonstrated, it is unclear why Team Evil has not participated in the current campaign to a greater extent. It is possible the group is planning something for the future.
Cold Zero (aka Cold Z3ro or Roma Burner)
Cold Zero first gained notoriety for an attack on the Likud Party website in August 2008. He has since claimed responsibility for 5,000 website defacements, according to Gary Warner, an expert in computer forensics. He has a profile on the Arabic Mirror website, which lists 2,485 of these defacements. According to the Arabic Mirror site, 779 of these are related to the Gaza crisis.
Cold Zero is a member of Team Hell (discussed in the next section). Whereas most members of Team Hell are Saudi, Cold Zero is a Palestinian and is proficient in Hebrew. He runs a website at http://www.hackteach.net/.
Cold Zero is engaged in rivalries with other anti-Israeli hackers. He has hacked both al3sifa.com and soqor.net, leaving messages criticizing their administrators. His own website was also attacked by DNS Team, which we’ll discuss later.
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