‘Team-Evil Arab Hackers’ - ‘u KILL palestin people we KILL Israeli servers’

I wonder why the mainstream media kept a lid on this little gem.

Hundreds of Israeli Web sites were shut down by pro-Palestinian hackers as Israeli troops invaded southern Gaza after the abduction of an Israeli soldier, an Israeli newspaper reported Thursday.

The Jerusalem Post said about 700 Web sites were shut down early Wednesday [SF-Indymedia says over 750].

Their home pages were replaced by the message, "Hacked by Team-Evil Arab hackers u KILL palestin people we KILL Israeli servers."

By early today, all the Web sites were back online. The report could not be independently confirmed.

Among the sites mentioned were Israel's largest bank, Bank Hapoalim, as well as a hospital in Haifa, BMW Israel, Subaru Israel and Citroen Israel.

Globes Online, an Israeli business portal, played down the attack's significance.

The attack was essentially simple, and was based on finding an unsecured point in the host server and reaching the hosted sites through it. The hacker group and its method of attack (substituting the home page) are not new and are well known to those who deal in the field. Nevertheless, because of the attack's timing and its degree of success, it generated more headlines than usual.

Yuval Ben-Itzhak, CTO of network security company Finjan, was unperturbed by the attack. "This is something that recurs every so often, when something political happens. When the IDF carried out operations in Lebanon it happened more than once. It occurs frequently, and it occurs on sites that have security holes. The attacks are generally carried out using automatic intrusion tools, and no very sophisticated method is involved."

According to Ben-Itzhak, "The attack was according to a very fixed pattern, and anyone in the security industry has seen such things many times in the past few years. I won't be surprised if there's a repeat attack."

But that begs the question, if it's so 'fixed' and simple, why can't they prevent it?

The group, Team-Evil, has hit Israeli targets before. In April, they took credit for hacking into the Web sites of the Israel Institute for Biological Research and McDonalds Israel. The group, which contains at least six members, claims to be based in Morocco and their signature began appearing in 2004 in attacks focusing on US government Web sites. Even in the anti-American attacks, the messages left by Team-Evil left an anti-Israel message.

* * *

Team-Evil's hackers seem to be unconcerned about potential punishment, frequently attaching their individual code names and e-mail addresses to their messages.

Some scholars have adopted the term "hacktivism" to describe the phenomenon and to differentiate it from "cyberterrorism," in which terror groups or individuals use the Internet to carry out terror attacks such as disrupting power grids, shutting down phone service or taking control of an airplane. "Cyberterror" attacks are food for popular concern, but no successful cyberterror attacks have been documented.

Instead, hackers' tactics have focused on site defacements, system penetrations, disinformation campaigns and have threatened the possible use of Trojan horses.

* * *

In 2000, around the outset of violence at the beginning of the second intifada, pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian hackers started a sideline war of their own, targeting Web sites supporting the opposing side, replacing guns and rocks with worms and Trojan horses.

But unlike the attack on Wednesday morning, the rash of attacks in 2000 focused on Web sites representing government, political and military organizations. Pro-Israel hackers used a FloodNet attack to disable six Web sites directly affiliated with Hizbullah and Hamas, as well as political Palestinian sites. FloodNet attacks are an example of denial of service attacks, reloading a targeted Web page several times per minute, thereby rendering the site inoperable.

Shortly later, Israeli Web sites, including the main government Web site, the Bank of Israel and the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, fell victim to pro-Palestinian hackers.

One such virus, known as "Injustice," was a pioneer in conveying a pro-Palestinian political message. That virus, which bared its face in 2001, acted as a "worm," infecting computers through the Outlook Express e-mail program. When the e-mail was opened, the text "apologized" for "disturbing" the victim, and then proceeded to tell a pro-Palestinian version of the events surrounding the death of 12-year-old Mohammed al-Dura, whom Palestinians claimed was killed in crossfire by IDF troops.

Regardless of who's behind these attacks, there are lessons to be learned from this.

1. Infrastructure is an easy target.
2. One man can cripple armies - indeed nations.