Bethel Finance news:
Israel’s news cycle has been dominated for the past two weeks by increasingly panicky reports of an escalating cyber war between it and the Arab world.
The successive tit-for-tat squabble started about two weeks ago, when a hacker claiming to be a Saudi citizen and calling himself oxOmar posted personal information connected to about 20,000 Israeli credit card users, causing a nationwide tizzy.
An Israeli hacker gamely identifying himself as oxOmer responded, posting about 2,000 internet passwords belonging to Saudi users, but no personal credit card details. Then, after a warning sent to the Israeli news website Ynet by a previously unknown pro-Palestinian group calling itself “nightmare,” the websites of Israel’s national airline, ElAl, and the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange were marred and briefly shut down.
The next day, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi’s stock exchanges were temporarily crippled by similar assaults. Several Israeli banks blocked access to their sites from all foreign computers.
Not everyone found the Israeli brinksmanship amusing. Israel’s minister for intelligence, Dan Meridor, condemned the Israeli hackers.
"Individual initiatives by Israeli hackers to attack Saudi hackers, or hackers from anywhere else for that matter, are ineffective and shouldn’t be done in Israel’s name," he said in an interview with Israel radio. “And there is no evidence that these hackers are even Saudi.”
Yitzchak Ben Israel, a military expert recently appointed to head the government’s new cyber security task force, sounded exasperated when answering a giddy journalist’s question on the same radio station. About the possibility that any of the rebel Israeli counter-hackers may have links to the government, he said, “These are not even youths. Some of them are actual high school students.”
For all the media hullabaloo, Israeli specialists in the field of cyber security reject the term “cyber war” altogether when it comes to the recent high jinx.
“This is not serious stuff,” said Erez Petrank, a professor of computer science and expect on encryption at Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology. “These hackers are being presented as geniuses. Most of them are simply very patient. They download a number of tools which they don’t even build themselves, and attack and attack sites until they find one that isn’t secure.”
“It is just a group of people with time on their hands. Retirees. High schoolers without enough homework. Anyone can download hacking tools that work automatically,” he added.
Petrank, in fact, is sanguine about the attacks that have taken place.
“Honestly, these companies should all be thankful for what happened,” he said. “This guy posted credit card numbers? We should be grateful! It would have been less surprising if he had simply used those credit cards or taken advantage of them to get money. He posted them and immediately the companies cancelled them all.”
The effect was mostly psychological, Petrank pointed out, and ultimately, the attacks helped companies better understand their security weaknesses.
“Excellent! They discovered breaches in their security and didn’t even have to pay for the service. Companies usually have to pay hackers to break into their sites. This guy gave them a free service.”
A real problem, Petrank said, would have involved a Day Zero scenario in which hackers succeeded in accessing the internal operating system of any of these companies.
“Putting an Arabic sentence on El Al’s website is like playing with a store’s display window. It’s nothing. Real hackers do their business and leave no traces, and they do not run around boasting to news sites,” he said.
No comments:
Post a Comment