14 DAY TRIAL // On Saturday, we learned that hacktivists from RedHack, Anonymous and Sector 404 claimed to have taken down the official website of Israel’s Secret Intelligence Service (mossad.gov.il). They also claimed to have leaked the details of over 30,000 Israeli officials.
Dr. Tal Pavel, an Internet security expert and professor at the Tel Aviv University, has told The Times of Israel that the leaked information doesn’t appear to belong to Israeli officials.
Initially, everyone believed that the data was harvested from Mossad’s systems. However, the hackers later clarified that the distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack launched against mossad.gov.il was not directly linked to the data leak.
However, Pavel highlights the fact that the spreadsheets published online by the hacktivists – containing names, email addresses, phone numbers and other identification information – doesn’t appear to have anything to do with agents or politicians.
Instead, the names are associated with businesses, educational institutions, synagogues, municipalities and NGOs. Additionally, some of the names appear to be connected with Arab communities from Israel.
Israeli officials haven’t made any statements regarding the Mossad website outage.