The recent hacker attacks on government websites partially disrupted the services of NetVision, one of Israel’s largest Internet providers.
“Globes” has learned that many NetVision subscriber surfers had troubled getting online yesterday. NetVision published a statement today that the overload was caused by hostile elements trying to shut down government and IDF websites stored on NetVision’s servers.
The virtual assault by foreign operators was carried out by masses of e-mail sent to government offices, some of which contained anti-Semitic messages. Another method used to overload the servers was to continuously send large numbers of messages to a server’s Internet address. Mass simultaneous e-mails slow down access to sites and can even cause temporary crashes.
“We are taking measures, which for obvious reasons, we would rather not reveal, to prevent similar attacks. We have not come across to date any case in which access to the Internet through us was shut down for even a moment,” said NetVision general manager Gilad Rabinovich.
In response to claims that a great many surfers were unable to go online to company’s services last night, Rabinovich said that while there were difficulties in connecting at times, there was no break down of services.
“NetVision is exposed to serious violence which is part of the struggle between Israel and Palestinian groups. This violence, which consisted of hacker attacks to try to crash official websites of the State of Israel, caused blockages to Internet infrastructures and damaged services the company offers its customers,” said Rabinovich.
Before Yom Kippur, chain letters were sent online calling for people to join an effort to crash Hizballah’s Internet site. Surfers were briefed to download content that flooded the site’s servers with false alarms. The site crashed as a result of the overload. Hizballah created new sites at new addresses, but, when discovered, they too were attacked and crashed. It is difficult to locate the source of the attacks, because it is possible to use anonymous e-mail addresses.
Rabinovich said that NetVision was not taking a position regarding the legality of the attempts to crash foreign websites by Israeli surfers, even if they are carried out and publicized on sites stored on the company’s server. “Just as it is possible to use a Bezeq telephone line or Israel Electric Corporation's electrical supply for improper purposes, similar things can be done online. NetVision has no position on the matter,” said Rabinovich.
A few months ago, the company sent a letter to one of its subscribers who stored pirated software on a site on the company’s server, warning him that NetVision would be forced to remove him from its customer list.
According to widespread comments at the time, the company later retracted its intention, on the grounds that if NetVision admitted to legal liability for the content appearing on sites stored on its server, it could find itself liable for committing or abetting criminal acts carried out by the persons responsible for the site.
“We are apparently facing the first stage of a counter-attack, and we will probably see more sophisticated attacks as time goes on,” said Daniel Broadner, a senior information security advisor at CA. He said that the attacks we are seeing now are by flooding e-mail boxes at government offices, and by sending mass requests to web servers. These are primitive methods comparable to the unorganized stoning-throwing on the “real” world.
“Reports at several sites around the world state that Hizballah is trying to recruit professional hackers to open a more sophisticated electronic war against Israel,” Broadner added.
He detailed a number of methods to solve the transmission overload, depending on the type of attack. In case of mass e-mail, it is possible to dedicate a particular bandwidth for the subscribers’ e-mail, thereby allowing reasonable speed to surf sites on the remaining bandwidths. However, company subscribers would suffer from the reduced bandwidth provided by the connection, and e-mail transmission would slow down.
Published by Israel's Business Arena on 26 October 2000