Palestinian hackers jam Israeli hospital websites

JERUSALEM (JWN and agencies)—A group of hackers identifying themselves as “Anonymous Palestine” struck a number of key Israel websites on Wednesday, paralyzing them for hours.

The sites attacked belonged to two hospitals—Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer and Assouta Medical Center in Tel Aviv—plus the Haaretz newspaper’s Hebrew website.

The attacks were in the form of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), which saturated the websites’ servers with download demands such that they could not respond to legitimate Internet traffic.

A Sheba spokesman said the Mossad had identified multiple attempts to break into the hospital’s website, similar to previous cyber attacks last week on key Israeli websites, such as the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and El Al Airlines.

The shutdown lasted for several hours, but officials said the hacking was confined to the websites and had not penetrated patients’ personal files.

Another hacking victim was the website of the Israel Festival. Anonymous Palestine hacked into the site and wrote “Free Palestine” in several sections, with an image of the Israeli and American flags burning.

The cyber war began several weeks ago when a hacker calling himself “0xOmar” penetrated an Israeli sports site and published the credit card details of thousands of Israelis. He was joined by a group calling itself Nightmare, which then attacked the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and El Al Airlines sites.

Israeli hackers have retaliated by publishing the log-in details of some 20,000 Arab Facebook users and paralyzing websites in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.