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Thousands of Plain Text Logins Leaked by Hackers in “#OpSaveGaza”

Anonymous hackers conduct cyber-attacks on Israeli institutions

Jul 22, 2014 07:32 GMT  ·  By
Pro-palestine hackers target Israeli governement
   Pro-palestine hackers target Israeli governement

The most recent attacks of a group of hackers that targets various websites belonging to the Israeli government include login credentials leaks and bringing down two official Israeli websites.

As the tension in the Gaza strip continues to increase, Anonymous hackers resorted to cyber attacks to determine the Israeli government to cease the military assault and remove their troops.

On Monday, the hacker group AnonGhost Team (@AnonGhostTeam) announced on Twitter that they managed to break into the systems of the Israeli government and extract the usernames and passwords of 175 user accounts, which they posted in plain text on Pastebin.

Under the same #OpSaveGaza banner, another group, going by the Twitter handle @IzzahHackers, tweeted another Pastebin link pointing to alleged details (names, emails, phone numbers and passwords) of individuals, for both official and personal accounts. The entire list comprises about 4,000 entries.

The Anonymous hackers have also directed distributed denial-of-service attacks on several official websites, plenty of them being still down at the moment of writing. Among the affected websites are those of the Ministry of Defence (defence.gov.il), Ministry of Education (edu.gov.il), Israel Defense Forces (idf.gov.il), and the Tel Aviv Polilce Department (telaviv.police.gov.il).

The recent tweet from AnonGhost Team informs that the website of the Turkish Ministry of Agriculture (gonentarimilce.gov.tr) has been hacked, also as part of #OpSaveGaza. Indeed, attempting to access it brings up a message from the hackers that says, “HaCked by AnonGhost in support of #OpSaveGaza. People, wake up !”

These are only the most recent cyber attacks deployed by the hackers, as last week they leaked multiple sets of information on Pastebin, including emails with both plain text and encrypted passwords, claiming to be for accounts of government officials from the Israeli Justice Department, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Public Security and Ministry of Culture.

The Anonymous movement working under the #OpSaveGaza flag includes multiple groups of hackers as well as individuals, who, besides breaching the systems and exposing information in the databases, also carry out website defacements.

AnonGhost Team published a list of the websites they targeted for defacement, which includes the type of offensive action taken by the group.

Also last week, Hamas’ military wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, hijacked the satellite broadcast of Israeli Channel 10 for a few minutes, to show images of wounded people as a result of air-strikes on the Gaza area.

Although the conflict in the region is steadily moving into the digital world, there will still be victims, on both sides.