It’s a well known fact that cyber attacks are becoming more and more commonplace in times of conflict – that much is well-established with the Russian attacks on Ukraine. Russia and Ukraine trade attacks in cyber space almost as frequently as they do on the battle field.
The recent state of affairs between Israel and Palestine has also seen a huge rise in cyber attacks with known hacktivist groups supporting both sides intensifying their cyber attacks.
The first such attacks were launched against Israel by AnonGhost less than one hour after the first rockets were fired by Hamas. The group targeted emergency warning systems, claiming to have taken down alerting applications in Israel.
For several years, the AnonGhost Team’s activity has primarily involved defacing websites with anti-western, anti-Israel and anti-Semitic messages, so the hacking of an early-warning alert app is a significant ramp up in their capabilities.
A post on X.com by @GroupIB_TI shows that AnonGhost intercepted the app API calls and injected fake alerts which were sent to the apps’ 10K – 20K users
A separate attack on the Jerusalem Post was claimed by Anonymous Sudan – a hacking team which are believed by many to be linked to (or indeed a part of) a group of Russian hackers – specifically KillNet which work closely together to spread pro-Kremlin propaganda and to target Ukraine’s allies in the West.
Killnet themselves, announced on Sunday that it would target all Israeli government systems with distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
The group said it blamed Israel for the bloodshed being caused and accused the country of supporting Ukraine and NATO. Killnet then claimed it brought down an Israeli government website and the website of security agency Shin Bet for a period of time on Sunday.
Pro-Israel groups have also waged their own attacks, targeting Palestinian organisations with cyber attacks.
One group – The Indian Cyber Force, said it had taken down the Palestinian National Bank’s website and Hamas’s website on Sunday along with further attacks targeting schools, hospitals, and commercial sites.
Regardless of who you support in such times, one thing is for certain, innocent people are being affected in ways that we can only imagine – We live in troubled times, but fortunately (for us) those troubled times rarely affect us dircetly.
As a society, we have become almost totally reliant on the Internet and the services it provides, such as email, messaging services and of course, the WWW.
The fragility of the Internet however, is something that is made very clear in times such as those currently being played out in Ukraine and Israel.
