2023-10-11 13:43:43
Last Saturday, Israel saw how the bloody military incursion launched by Hamas opened a painful gap in his system of intelligence and in its military apparatus. The Jewish State has responded by suffocating Gaza under a hail of bombs and cutting off access to water, food, gasoline and electricity to the territory. As fighting intensifies in the streets, cyberactivists and criminal groups around the world are joining a guerra which is also waged on the network.
In the early stages of the renewed conflictat least a hundred groups have launched a wave of cyber attacks against Israel’s infrastructure, according to the FalconFeedsio intelligence platform, but also against Palestine. Different firms of cybersecurity point out that in most cases these would be distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS for its acronym in English), a method that consists of coordinating an avalanche of requests to a server to collapse it.
The self-proclaimed ‘hacktivists’ —’hackers‘ and activists—have attacked Israel’s critical infrastructure such as its banking and energy sectors. On Sunday, they managed to paralyze the website of the media ‘The Jerusalem Post’. Other pro-Palestinian groups such as AnonGhost claim to have stolen data and even to have Israeli security alert service hacked missilesknown as Red Alert, to launch false alarm messages and sow panic among the population.
Prorusian groups
Among those who have announced their participation in the contest are Islamic groups that have supported the Palestinian cause for years. However, they also highlight hackers linked to Russia like Killnet, UserSec or Anonymous Sudan. They have previously attacked governments and companies opposed to the Kremlin and have accelerated their criminal activity on the Internet after the invasion of Ukraine.
“The scope is international, but it is rather limited to the pre-existing ideological blocks within ‘hacktivism’,” Alex Leslie, a threat intelligence analyst at the security company Recorded Future, explained to ‘Wired’ magazine.
The opacity with which these groups operate makes it difficult to know the scope and final motivation of their attacks. Thus, while some are trying to block access to strategic web services, others could be announcing cyberattacks that are not carried out with the intention of inciting panic, spreading disinformation or as a self-promotional exercise. And positioning themselves in the middle of a conflict that focuses the attention of the entire world could help them build their reputation.
Unequal cyberwar
In cyberspace, the conflict between Israel and Palestine is as or more asymmetrical than on the military or economic level. For decades, the Jewish State has promoted a technology industry strongly linked to its security section that has turned it into a power in matters of surveillance. Thus, the Hebrew State is home to a third of the world’s cybersecurity unicorns—emerging companies valued at $1 billion or more—according to its National Cyber Directorate.
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This would explain that the majority of actors who have launched cyberattacks from different corners of the planet sean propalestinos, since Hamas’s ability to operate on the network is limited. The “total siege” launched by Israel against Gaza has already managed to cut electricity in the region, thus disconnecting it from Internet.
Although the conflict has relaunched activity in the cybersphere, its level is even lower. “We are not seeing true domestic malicious actors yet,” Rob Joyce, director of cybersecurity at the National Security Agency, said Monday (NSA), one of the United States intelligence services. The worst may be yet to come.
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