Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Knife to a Gunfight: Anonymous Attempts to Hack Israel

From Quartz:
In waging cyberattacks against Israel, Anonymous is bringing a knife to a gunfight. 

The loosely organized hacker group pledged its support for Gaza last week, then set about attacking the enemy. The news arm of Anonymous immediately got to boasting on Twitter, but there isn’t much to show for all of the talk. Over at Gizmodo, Sam Biddle breaks down the actual damage done so far. Anonymous has defaced or deactivated over 600 websites that have a .il domain suffix, but these were mostly small businesses with no connection to the government or military.

Anonymous’s biggest successful takedown was the Bank of Jerusalem; the bank’s site was back up the same day. In addition, more than 44 million hacking attempts have been made on Israeli government websites since the start of the offensive, but just one site was taken down and only for 10 minutes....MORE
However, CNN is reporting:
...Anonymous, meanwhile, posted a list of more than 650 Israel-based websites it says it has taken down or defaced since last week.

"They've knocked down websites, deleted databases and have leaked e-mail addresses and passwords," Casey Chan wrote Friday for the tech site Gizmodo. "It's a whopping takedown."...
If you recall, a year ago  Anonymous threatened to name associates of Los Zetas but backed down almost immediately.
It's all fun and games until somebody gets decapitated.