guardian.co.uk,
Matthew Kalman in Jerusalem, Monday 7
November 2011
 |
| Israeli security experts have rejected claims that the Anonymous hacker group was behind the failure of several government websites on Sunday. Photograph: Rex |
Israeli
officials and security experts have rejected claims that a cyber-attack by the
hacker group Anonymous was behind the failure of several government websites on
Sunday, including those of the Mossad, the Shin Bet secret service, the Israeli
army and some government ministries.
The
websites were inaccessible for several hours but all were back online again by
Monday.
In a
YouTube video posted last Friday, Anonymous threatened to "strike
back" at Israel if it continued to block vessels attempting to reach Gaza
by sea. The video was released shortly after Israeli naval commandos boarded a
Canadian and Irish vessel sailing to Gaza and arrested the passengers and crew.
In the
YouTube message An Open Letter from Anonymous to the Government of Israel, an
electronically generated voice can be heard accusing Israel of "piracy on
the high seas". "Your actions are illegal, against democracy, human
rights, international, and maritime laws," the statement continues.
"Justifying war, murder, illegal interception, and pirate-like activities
under an illegal cover of defence will not go unnoticed by us or the people of
the world.
"We do
not tolerate this kind of repeated offensive behaviour against unarmed
civilians. If you continue blocking humanitarian vessels to Gaza or repeat the
dreadful actions of 31 May 2010 against any Gaza freedom flotillas then you
will leave us no choice but to strike back. Again and again, until you stop."
The message ends with a warning: "Expect us."
The Israeli
sites crashed about 48 hours later. An army spokesperson said it was "a
coincidence" – a response dismissed by observers who noted that several
Palestinian sites were hacked last week, as was the site of the Russell
tribunal, currently hearing testimony in South Africa on why Israel is an
apartheid state.
But Nitzan
Miron, a former member of Matzov, the cyber security division of the Israeli
military, responsible for defending networks from hackers, said the breakdown
was "a really strange coincidence".
Miron, now
chief executive of 6Scan, a website security start-up in Tel Aviv, said there
had been a hardware crash rather than a software problem caused by a
cyber-attack. "Nothing is impossible but it doesn't look like it [a
cyber-attack]," he said. He said a decision to group all the sites in one
hardware system had resulted in a chain reaction of malfunctions.
"It's
all part of a project called Tehila that puts all of those sites together in one
data centre. When one fell, they all fell. The back-ups failed. Hopefully next
time they'll have better back-ups and this kind of thing shouldn't
happen," he said. "Those were just the front-end sites. They don't
contain the actual classified information."
The
successful penetration of some of Israel's most prominent sites would be a
major embarrassment to the Israelis, who pioneered cyber security and whose
algorithms protect large swaths of computerised banking and e-commerce around
the world.
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