About 750 Israeli Internet sites were attacked last night by Arab hackers. The sites, mainly hosted by NetVision Ltd. (TASE: ), were attacked by hackers from Morocco calling themselves "Team Evil". The attack was politically motivated, and came in response to the IDF's operation in the Gaza Strip.
The hackers swapped the sites' home pages with the message: "Hacked by team-evil Arab hackers; u kill Palestinian people, we kill Israeli servers.”
The attack mainly hit commercial sites, but also some political and public service sites. Among the sites affected were those of investment house Halman Aldubi, Bank Otzar Hahayal, BMW Israel, Subaru Israel, and the Kadima party youth site.
The attack was essentially simple, and was based on finding an unsecured point in the host server and reaching the hosted sites through it. The hacker group and its method of attack (substituting the home page) are not new and are well known to those who deal in the field. Nevertheless, because of the attack's timing and its degree of success, it generated more headlines than usual.
Yuval Ben-Itzhak, CTO of network security company Finjan, was unperturbed by the attack. "This is something that recurs every so often, when something political happens. When the IDF carried out operations in Lebanon it happened more than once. It occurs frequently, and it occurs on sites that have security holes. The attacks are generally carried out using automatic intrusion tools, and no very sophisticated method is involved."
According to Ben-Itzhak, "The attack was according to a very fixed pattern, and anyone in the security industry has seen such things many times in the past few years. I won't be surprised if there's a repeat attack."
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes.co.il - on June 28, 2006
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