Hackers Take the Fight Over Gaza Online

Hackers Take the Fight Over Gaza Online

www.securitymanagement.com

01/07/2009 - As Israel continues its military campaign inside the Gaza Strip for the 12th consecutive day to cripple Hamas' ability to shoot rockets into its territory, both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian hacker groups have taken up the fight online.

According to reports, thousands of sites mainly belonging to small businesses have been breached.

Some very high profile sites, such as Ynetnews.com, were also hacked to display items such as a step-by-step picture guide to the progressive takeover of Palestinian land by settlers, and the alleged torture of detainees by American soldiers and Palestinian victims of Israeli attacks.

Hackers also attacked the Bank Discount web site leaving anti-Israeli messages, but did not access any accounts.

(visit the link for the full news article)

Here is a perfect example of Hacktivism, characterized as "the nonviolent use of illegal or legally ambiguous digital tools in pursuit of political ends". If you read the story it looks as if some of the downloads being offered on some of the sites are really trojans, and will basically make your computer vulnerable to become part of a Botnet. So the lines of war are not only being drawn in the sands of Gaza, but across the electronic frontier as well.

www.securitymanagement.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Well......

at least nobody can die as a result of this, so......

????????

Originally posted by mr-lizard
Well......

at least nobody can die as a result of this, so......

????????

Not necessarily, depends on how far they take it.

I'm not quite sure i follow....

Please elaborate

Hackers can access power grids, water supply computers, credit systems, anything that is connected to the internet. If computers that control power grids and water supplies are hacked, people could die from that.

In water treatment plants, there are not people that are actually treating the water with chemicals, it is all controlled by computer systems. Can you imagine if a hacker was to infiltrate one of those systems and stop a critical process in the filtration of water. If that tainted water made it to the masses, you could be talking disease, and death. All because someone got into a computer system. Just about everything is tied to computer networks at this point.

Yeah i understand now....

But surely those systems are safeguarded against such things? I'm no expert but i'd imagine they'd be very tricky....

reply to post by mr-lizard


I work in the Oil Industry, and I also work on the side in the computer security field. I am here to tell you, as long as there is a human factor involved with these computer systems, there will always be a way in. There are no networks out there that are completely hack proof....look at the US Government, you would think that they would be inpenetrable as well, but they get hacked all the time.