Hacktivism group uses DoS flaw to take down both websites

Aug 28, 2016 22:25 GMT  ·  By

Ghost Squad Hackers (GSH) have told Softpedia about their recent attacks on the websites of Bank of Israel and the Prime Minister's Office.

The attacks, which took place over the weekend, hit the Bank of Israel portal first and then the official page of Israel Prime Minister's Office.

For these attacks, the group didn't resort to DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) but used a DoS (Denial of Service) vulnerability in the underlying web servers to take down the websites.

S1ege, GSH's leader, told Softpedia that the Bank of Israel website came back online after six hours, when the bank's IT staff moved the site to new servers.

At the time of writing, 72 hours after the attack, the Prime Minister's website is still offline, sporting an error message.

GSH did it for Palestine

Asked why the group attacked these two targets all of a sudden, S1ege told Softpedia the following:

  We are attacking Israel for the ongoing atrocities they are committing on the Palestinian people. They just recently bombed Gaza again. The genocide needs to end. They are expanding an empire into land/ground that they do not own, over a book. There is a perpetual silence in the mainstream media. We hope our attacks will bring more awareness to this subject and bring more protests to this issue.  

S1ege also mentioned plans for future attacks, which the group will execute in the following days.

  Yes we have some attacks planned for Israel. We, in [the] past, leaked IDF [Israel Defense Force]'s database. We plan to do similar attacks in the future if there is no word of the ongoing genocide in Israel. The United States mainstream media works as stenographers for the U.S. government and speaks nothing of this its corruption at it's finest. We will not stand idly by and let it continue. We also plan to attack the Syrian government.  

GSH aligns with Palestine on the neverending Middle East conflict

At the beginning of June, GSH announced #OpSilence, month-long DDoS attacks against mainstream media, also because of its failure to report on the Palestine war and the crimes happening in Syria. The group's most high-profile targets in #OpSilence included FOX News and CNN.

GSH was also the driving force behind #OpIcarus, another month-long campaign of DDoS attacks against banks and financial institutions around the world, a campaign that put their name on the map of today's most active hacktivism groups.

Below are two Facebook posts that S1ege shared with Softpedia regarding their recent attacks.