"Maglan Research Labs has collected 122,000 hacked e-mail, credit card and Paypal accounts," Maglan Information Defense Technologies Ltd. technology director Shai Blitzblau told "Globes". "We've involved Israel's security authorities. 2,100 Israeli sites were hacked in the ten days after the flotilla incident. That's extraordinary."
Blitzblau said that tens of thousands of Israeli will have to take drastic measures, including closing their e-mail accounts and opening new ones, change their passwords to their accounts at Paypal, banks, and credit cards.
Some of the more than 100,000 stolen Gmail, Facebook and Messenger addresses stolen by Turkish hackers include those of employees of government agencies and major companies. A third of the addresses were hacked from classified ads site Homeless, Chabad, and Pizza Hut Israel.
Israeli blogger Erez Wolf broke first details of the hacking on his blog We CMS. He found an Excel file with 32,530 e-mail addresses and passwords published on a Turkish forum, Cyber Warrior. The information was obtained by hackers in the wake of the Gaza flotilla incident. Wolf said that the e-mail addresses included 142 addresses with an Israeli government suffix (gov.il) and 305 addresses with academic suffixes (ac.il).
Some e-mail addresses and passwords disclosed belong to Bank Hapoalim (TASE: POLI), Bank Leumi (TASE: LUMI), Amdocs Ltd. (NYSE: DOX), Comverse Technology Inc. (Pink Sheets: CMVT), HP Israel Ltd., Harel Insurance Investments and Financial Services Ltd. (TASE: HARL), Migdal Insurance and Financial Holdings Ltd. (TASE: MGDL), and Deloitte Brightman Almagor Zohar, among others.
E-mails from Bank of Israel, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (Nasdaq: TEVA; TASE: TEVA), NICE Systems Ltd. (Nasdaq: NICE; TASE: NICE), and Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (Nasdaq: CHKP), among other sources, could be found on the list.
The file has been removed from the Turkish forum's site.
Should we expect a wave of fraud following the hacking of the credit card and PayPal accounts?
"I wouldn’t call it a wave of embezzlement and fraud, but a sporadic increase of fraud beyond what we had in recent months, because this information is floating freely through the Internet. It's important to remember that e-mail addresses and credit card information are constantly stolen, but this doesn’t wander freely around the Internet. In the Turkish case, we have information about 100,000 accounts wandering around the Internet."
What should we do?
Blitzblau: "The best solution is to close your e-mail account and replace your credit card, and, if possible, change the access passwords to all websites to which you have access: Facebook, Amazon, your bank account - everything. Alternatively, you can change your passwords to a new 8-digit alphanumeric code, and hope that nothing will happen.
"We estimate that a third of the Israelis whose addresses were hacked have no choice but to go with the first solution. We already know about 12,000-13,000 e-mail accounts that have been misused, such as to send malicious code, viruses, and spyware through them without their owners aware of it."
Are the Turkish hackers really good, or is the problem with us?
"No, they're not really good, but we don’t pay them enough attention regarding information security problems. We also suffer from hubris. The second problem is that a lot of the websites that were hacked for the e-mail addresses and credit cards have almost no protection, because the site owners apparently went for the cheapest solutions."
What are Israeli hackers doing?
"Some pro-Israeli hackers fought back, but did not continue for more than ten days after the Gaza flotilla incident. In contrast to the Turkish hackers, the Israelis directed their attack at government offices, and the success rate was very high. Almost 60 Turkish government websites were hacked by Israelis. The attack wasn’t directed against private persons; it could be called an ethical approach."
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on July 20, 2010
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