Arab internet users all over the world succeeded in crippling two major Israeli websites on Wednesday in an attempt to counter-attack Israel's efforts to overload Hizbollah websites, reported the Daily Star on Thursday.
After the paper published on Tuesday a detailed article on how Israelis had established a site to attack Hizbollah’s web site, Arab users began a counter-offensive. By 1 p.m. Wednesday, the main Israeli government website (www.israel.org) and the Israeli Foreign Ministry's website (www.israel-mfa.gov.il) had been downed by hackers.
The Jerusalem Post website issued a report at 2.10 p.m. confirming that the Israeli Foreign Ministry website was down, said the paper.
"Spam (overloading) and hacker assaults have also been detected on a number of other government sites as well as the IDF (Israel Defense Force) website. Ministry sources told Israel Radio the attackers were traced to "Islamic internet sites," according to the Jerusalem Post.
An Israeli Foreign Ministry official said: "The site itself was not damaged, but at the moment, no one can access it.” The official said the website attack could be traced to a "pro-Palestinian and pro-Shiite Muslim" website in the US that urged internet users to flood the Foreign Ministry site.
Chat rooms frequented by Arab users throughout the world were also mobilized, with information about how to attack Israeli websites and updates on which websites have already been targeted, according to the Daily Star.
An internet programmer told the paper that the attack against Israeli websites was more professional than the attack staged by Israeli supporters over the past two weeks to cripple Hizbollah's website.
"While the Israelis and their supporters simply overloaded Hizbollah websites and those related to the resistance and Intifada to eventually cripple them, our attack was destructive," he said.
The programmer explained that Lebanese hackers detected the security loophole on the Israeli websites, allowing them to have full control over all data on these sites. "Hence, all data was deleted," the programmer said.
Hizbollah’s site was not the only Arab site that came under the attacks of Israeli hackers. In addition to Hamas site, and the that of the Palestinian Information Center, Albawaba.com was forced early October to stop receiving messages to its political forum after the largest Arab portal was flooded with thousands of messages from Israeli hackers who attempted to crash the server.
“The attack was an organized effort by Israelis who posted technical instructions at Israeli sites on how to send messages in the most crippling way possible. WE could tell they were angry with our coverage of the violence in the West Bank and Gaza and with the pro-Palestinian opinions posted on the forum,” said Ramzi Khoury, editor-in-chief of Albawaba.com in a press release on October 11 – (Albawaba.com)
© 2000 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
