The new attack #OpIsraelReborn will occur on September 11th and is aimed at Israeli financial institutions
AnonGhost, an affiliate of the notorious hacker group Anonymous, is threatening a new cyber-blitz on Israeli websites to commemorate the 12-year anniversary of September 11th.
The group posted a long list of Israeli Internet targets, including many government websites, on Internet forums used by the Anonymous hacker group.
The group has been making threats on its Twitter account @An0nGhost, and has hashtagged its new effort #OpIsraelReborn, referring to its previous attacks on Israeli internet sites.
Anonymous made several attacks on Israel during Operation Pillar of Defense, when Israel conducted air strikes in the Gaza Strip to stem the tide of rockets being launched by Hamas and its affiliates.
Since then, the AnonGhost group has carried out two other campaigns against Israeli websites. The first, named #OpIsrael, took place in April on Holocaust Remembrance Day. The second and most recent campaign, bearing the title #OpIsraelReloaded, started on Jun. 7, 2013, and was in response to a retaliatory Israeli hacker campaign named #OpIslam.
The group announced on Saturday Sep. 7 that it had obtained 165,000 listings of names, addresses, e-mail accounts, and phone numbers of Israelis, and then posted the list on Anonymous' internet forums.
Haaretz reports that the information was likely obtained from hacking into an Israeli web hosting site, though it is unclear how accurate or up to date that data is and whether it contains duplicates.
The group also claimed via Twitter to have obtained the details of over 5,000 credit cards belonging to Israelis and will release the information on Sep 11.
The group announced #OpIsraelReborn on August 9th, and has been making periodic updates of its sporadic attacks on Israeli internet users via Twitter.
The group enlists hackers across the world to vandalize Israeli websites or cause a surge in traffic using distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks to render sites inactive. Both attack methods can be done using automatic tools that require little to no skill in programming.
The group's leader, known as the Mauritania Attacker, gave an interview with The Hackers Post, a website dedicated to providing news on worldwide hacking attacks.
The Mauritania Attacker claimed that the current operation would place a larger focus on financial institutions. He claimed that the next attack would target "some big central servers of [Israelis] and it will harm them economically."
"It is different from the last one," the Mauritania Attacker told the Hackers Post, "we learnt from the previous Operations, so this one we are gonna attack with experience and huge targets."
" We are targeting Israel cyber because they didn’t understand yet that there is no state Called Israel it is Palestine and do not forget that the last time when Israeli hackers launched #OpIslam we defeat them easily just do check the damage we did," said the Mauritania Attacker on his reasoning behind the attack.
"You have not stopped your endless human rights violations," the operation's organizers said in a post addressed to Israel's government on the Anonymous forums. "You have not stopped illegal settlements. You have not respected the cease-fire [ending Operation Pillar of Defense in November]. You have shown that you do not respect international law."
Shlomo Eisenberg, head of cyber intelligence at Cyuberlnt, a security company, has told Haaretz that AnonGhost's April attempt was unsuccessful.
"AnonGhost's high media presence attracts 'Script Kiddies' – youths who use automatic tools to attack; but these may be joined by programmers with better skills," he added.
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