Israel Suffered Massive Cyber Attack During Gaza Offensive

By Anshel Pfeffer,
Haaretz Correspondent
Last update - 07:25 15/06/2009
Courtesy Of Haaretz NewsPaper

Hackers launched an unprecedented attack on Israel's Internet infrastructure during the January military offensive in the Gaza Strip, and briefly paralyzed government sites, government officials said last week.

The attack, which focused on government Web sites, was executed by at least half a million computers.

Due to its resemblance to the attack launched on Georgia on the eve of its war with Russia last summer, Israeli officials believe it may have been carried out by a criminal organization from the former Soviet Union, and paid for by Hamas or Hezbollah.

Tehila, the body that manages the government's Web sites, managed to protect Israel's cyber infrastructure and fix most sites within 5 to 20 minutes, an official said.

But the Home Front Command's site, which instructs citizens how to protect themselves from attacks, was down for three hours, according to a senior official at command headquarters. The IDF Spokesman said service was suspended for only half an hour.

Cyber attacks on Israel are not new: Every time the conflict with the Palestinians flares up, Israeli Web sites suffer a barrage of virtual assaults. During the fighting in Gaza, however, the attack was unusually severe, consisting of four waves - each stronger than the last, and peaking at 15 million junk mail deliveries per second.

The source of the attack is still unknown. "Perhaps it's a genius hacker working alone who activated a program that took over hundreds of thousands of computers as a platform to launch the attack," said Tehila director Boaz Dolev. "But it certainly might have been carried out by
an organization."

"We need a uniform standard for all the country's major governmental and economic organizations to ensure that next time there's a big cyber attack, the economy isn't paralyzed completely," added a Defense Ministry official. "There's still a lot of work to be done in this area.