A 72-hour cease-fire that ended last Thursday has brought a brief calm in the Gaza strip, but Hacktivist continues to wage digital war against Israel and it has increased five times since the invasion early in July.
According to reports from Arbor Networks, the hacks intensified last month as violence in Gaza peaked.
The damage inflicted by the hackers
Hackers have targeted the websites of Israeli military agencies, financial services, and civilian governmental agencies. Even the Mossad, which is known to be Israel’s legendary intelligence agency, was attacked. The Prime Minister’s office was attacked by hackers as well. Since July, these attacks have increased by 500 percent.
According to US House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers in an interview, the cyber attacks on Israel websites could be dangerous to the security of the country because it may shut down these agencies’ operations.
There are experts, however, who say the cyber attacks inflict little harm to Israeli government because it is only targeting external, user-based website. It only slows down the loading of some websites and sometimes shutting down the page. But according to researchers, the cyber attacks have not affected the internal operations of these Israeli agencies.
According to LightCyber vice president Giora Engel, you must be a highly sophisticated hacker if you plan to inflict any effective damage against Israel. She said a group of hacktivist cant do any substantial damage.
Distributed Denial of Service Attacks
The cyber attacks done on big Israeli websites are called Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. It involves flooding websites with traffic to stop users from accessing these pages. These hackers have plenty of third-party computers to do their bidding. The owners of those computers may not even know that their devices are being used to do the hack attacks. From 30 denials a day in June, the number has increased to 150 a day in July.
