Hackers say OpIsrael caused billions of dollars in damage

Apr 8, 2013 06:51 GMT  ·  By

On April 7, around 30 hacktivist collectives from around the world united their forces for Operation Israel (OpIsrael). The hackers say they’ve caused massive damage, but Israeli officials are downplaying the incident, saying the attacks have hardly caused any real damage.

On Sunday, Twitter was flooded with reports about hacked Israeli websites. Distributed denial-of-service attacks were launched, data was leaked, sites were defaced, and social media accounts were hijacked.

According to reports from the @Op_Israel Twitter account, which coordinated the operation, over 100,000 sites, 40,000 Facebook accounts, 5,000 Twitter accounts, and some 30,000 Israeli bank accounts were impacted, resulting in damage estimated by the hackers at over $3 billion (2.31 billion EUR).

Government websites such as the ones of the Central Bureau of Statistics, the Prime Minister’s Office, the Ministry of Defense, the Israel Securities Authority, the Israel Secret Intelligence Service and the Foreign Ministry have been disrupted by DDOS attacks. Currently, many of them are still inaccessible.

Among the groups that have taken part in the operation we mention AnonGhost, LatinHackTeam, Moroccan Hackers, Mauritania Attacker and several Anonymous groups.

On the other hand, Israeli officials say the damage caused by the attack is not as big as the hacktivists claim.

“So far it is as was expected, there is hardly any real damage,” said Yitzhak Ben Yisrael, of the Israeli government's National Cyber Bureau, cited by The Independent.

“Anonymous doesn't have the skills to damage the country's vital infrastructure. And if that was its intention, then it wouldn't have announced the attack of time. It wants to create noise in the media about issues that are close to its heart.”

In addition, pro-Israeli hacker EhIsR hacked opisrael.com, one of the sites dedicated to the campaign against Israel.