On the evening of October 23, 2012, all the computers of police stations in the Israeli occupation state were hacked, and contrary to what is expected given the technical development in Israel, it took a whole week to discover the breach, while the hacked software was already It found its way to other Israeli government departments, and the result was servers down, internet access interrupted, after which USB devices were banned, disrupting services for another week.
(1)
The same event was repeated in February 2014, two years later, in this attack infiltrators breached the Civil Administration in Judea and Samaria, the government body that deals with all administrative matters in “Area A” in the West Bank (2).
Later, according to the network security company FireEye, it was announced that these attacks were linked to the Gaza Hacker team.
If you haven't heard of this group of hackers before, you have every excuse.
The truth is that almost nothing has been written about this team, because the frequency and strength of the attacks was relatively low in the first few years since the team was established in 2007, and the first documented report on the team’s successful attacks was issued in February 2008 by the Israeli Kadima party, which led it after That is former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
But after four years from that point, the team managed for a while to grab the headlines in the occupying country.
A good observer of the situation in the Gaza Strip may assume that this particular place is not the best point from which an electronic resistance can be launched due to the constant electricity and Internet cuts, unlike the West Bank, for example, where access to the Internet is better and electricity is more stable, but the West Bank carries a danger represented in daily arrests. Night raids on Palestinian villages and towns.
In addition, we must take into account the constant monitoring of Palestinian phones and computers in the West Bank. In testimonies and interviews in the Israeli media, the occupying power has been documented collecting data on the minute details of Palestinian lives, including sexual orientation, marital infidelity, financial problems, family medical conditions, and other private issues that can be used to coerce Palestinians to become cooperating or creating divisions within society (5). On the other hand, Gaza enjoys relatively greater security for Internet activists, as there are no raids and less censorship, so it has become the most suitable spot for the activity of electronic resistance fighters.
"Our goal is only jihad against the occupation, and we rarely do external attacks, and we do not follow anyone, we represent ourselves only, as the Gaza hacker team," so tells us, "Black Rose", the ethical hacker, and one of the members of the hacker team in an exclusive interview with
Maidan
, before To add emphasizing: "We are not affiliated with any internal or external political party."
Although the group is not affiliated with any political party, this gave it an additional point of strength, according to a Fatah member in his conversation with Eric Scheer, activist and researcher pro-Palestine, and author of the book Digital Jihad: “The Gaza hacker team was not affiliated with any political movement. You can classify it and alienate the Palestinians from it with a different political opinion” (6), meaning that they united the ranks of the Palestinians with their sole affiliation to Palestine and nothing but Palestine.
On the eleventh of July 2012, three months before the police station attacks - which were previously mentioned - the Gaza hacking team launched an electronic attack on the website of the Israeli Knesset, and the group published on the website's page a statement in which it confirmed that it had many secrets about Israeli leaders. The group also presented a list of several demands, including stopping the excavation work under the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque, stopping settlement construction in the West Bank, stopping the aggression on Gaza, and releasing all Palestinian prisoners (7). Although the occupation succeeded in discovering and stopping the attack after 8 minutes, it issued a warning about the Palestinian youth's intention to drag the battle with the occupation to the Internet.
Weeks later, the electronic resistance succeeded in achieving the most prominent breakthrough in its battle with the occupation, when it penetrated the computers of police stations and other Israeli government departments, and disrupted services in these institutions for a period of up to two weeks. Given the huge difference in technical and material capabilities in favor of the occupying power, this was a huge breakthrough by all standards. But although the effects of such attacks and their ability to inflict real damage on Israeli institutions for long periods remains limited, we can easily understand why Palestinian youth would like to invest more effort in this fight.
In June 2017, on a balmy summer morning, it suddenly seemed like everything in the country had gone backwards a decade. Suddenly and without warning, almost all of the mechanized and computerized systems fell out and stopped working, including ATMs, trains, computers at airports and television stations. Even the radiation monitors at the old Chernobyl nuclear plant malfunctioned.
Soon everyone found out that what happened was the result of a massive Russian cyber attack.
By the time the world learned about the culprit, a savage type of computer malicious program (or worm) known as "NotPetya", the attack had caused more than $10 billion in damages in Ukraine and a number of European countries, making it the most common cyber-attack. Cost to date(9).
No one usually dies in attacks like this, but the world was given a hint of a new reality beyond cyber espionage or sabotage. This was cyber warfare in every sense of the word.
Since modern life is more connected to the Internet than ever before, you can separate a nation from the entire world without firing a single shot.
In 2009, he launched the world's first digital weapon of this type, a "worm" built by the United States and Israel that is now known as "Stuxnet", with the primary objective of pushing back Iran's nuclear program for many years.
Through 15,000 lines of code, Stuxnet was designed to do more than steal data or disable computers, it was designed to feed security sensors at Iran's uranium enrichment plant with false information. In a state of frenzy, causing irreparable damage to the nuclear plant.
(10)
But Stuxnet didn't go away quite as planned, it got out of hand, infecting thousands of machines all over the world.
While the worm is now dormant (11) and programmed to appear only under specific circumstances (such as accessing a program at an Iranian nuclear facility), this military weapon has been offered in gray Internet markets, where neither the buyer nor the seller knows each other, and is now in the hands of Professional security experts, competing countries, as well as in the possession of criminals we don't even know who they are, which gives the game more dangerous dimensions.
Here is the video released by the IDF showing the air-strike against the building housing Hamas cyber forces.
pic.twitter.com/uHm2ZYa4AP
— Catalin Cimpanu (@campuscodi) May 5, 2019
(Video of the bombing of a hacker gathering center in Gaza)
Stuxnet likely actually prevented a real war, and weakened Israel's perceived need for a military strike against Iran. This has happened before. A decade later, the previous US Trump administration canceled a planned attack against Iran, replacing it in favor of a less expensive cyber attack (12). .
Wars of this kind are usually "electronic", an attack on my devices versus an attack on yours. The whole world did not witness a direct military attack in response to a cyber attack, until Israel bombed a building linked to hackers in Gaza in 2019(13).
Has your Facebook account been hacked before?
If the answer is "no" that's fine, the psychological stress caused by something simply hacking your Facebook account is too great, not to mention other damages.
Now imagine the level of anxiety when the penetration is at the level of countries, yes it is psychological warfare.
One example of this is the out-of-service (DDoS) attacks on Israel's El Al airline and the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange about a decade ago, this time conducted not by Palestinian activists, but by the hacker "Ox0mar" who was operating from Saudi.
The main problem with these attacks was never related to the magnitude and extent of the direct damage they caused, but rather to the damage to the occupying power's reputation as a superior technical power. Over the past two decades, Israel has built its reputation as a leading technical anti-virus power and the largest producer of firewalls, just as it has promoted its solid wall of physical security under the Iron Dome umbrella presented to the world as an indomitable military shield.
As a result, these breakthrough strikes are causing real panic in Israel. In the wake of the Oaks Omar attacks in early 2012, the breaches were heard in Israeli newspapers, led by the Yedioth Ahronoth website, one of whose articles began questioning government accounts, under the title: “What digital security?” (14). In the same context, Mark Goldberg, a blogger for the Israeli newspaper Al-Quds, noted that the attacks “showed our vulnerability to individuals working thousands of miles away” (15), while the director of the famous “Israel Matzav” blog ended one of his posts with the rhetorical question: “Is it not Supposed to have the best cybersecurity in the world? (16)
But the success in this psychological warfare did not stop Eric Skir from describing the Gaza hacker team as "Script kiddies," a pejorative term used to describe unskilled hackers who rely on tools developed by others to launch their attacks. However, he added to this description, stressing that "this does not mean that they do not pose a threat to the Israeli cyber infrastructure." (17)
Black Rose, an ethical hacker and a member of the Gaza
Hacking
Team, objects to the description of drunkard, commenting
to Maidan
: “That [Script Kid] hacker hacks and doesn't understand what he's doing exactly. in the world, and their names are mentioned in international sites.” Black Rose assures Meydan that "there are attacks that are secret and may not be published in newspapers or announced," which may lead to a miscalculation of their ability to launch attacks and consider them amateurs, and continues: "But as a team, we have strong cadres all over the world, We have partnerships with major teams, and we consider ourselves in the field like Anonymous and others.”
So, where was the Gaza team during the recent attacks last month?
Black Rose answers: "Since most of the team resides in Gaza and many of us had their devices destroyed along with their homes, we carried out our activities in cooperation with other teams, led by a Malaysian team that penetrated more than 170 sites of Zionist organizations."
The leak published by the "DragonForce Malaysia" team contains the databases of dozens of other Zionist companies, organizations and institutions, and is already published in an online file.
Well, it seems that digital resistance, as well as cyber wars, will be one of the prominent scenes in the coming years. We may hear about this type of activity today from time to time, but it has become a candidate to gain more presence, as one of the most effective and least expensive tools of resistance. .
______________________________________________________
Sources:
How Israel Police computers were hacked: The inside story
Xtreme RAT bites Israeli government sites, yet again
Operation Molerats: Middle East Cyber Attacks Using Poison Ivy
Digital Jihad: Palestinain resistance in the digital era, page 78
Israel's NSA Scandal
Digital Jihad: Palestinain resistance in the digital era, page 81
Arab Cyber-attackers Hack Knesset Website
8- Previous source المصدر
Hackers can stop the trains and the lights.
But could they start a war?
Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran
previous source
Trump approved cyber-strikes against Iranian computer database used to plan attacks on oil tankers
Israel launched an airstrike in response to a Hamas cyberattack
'Cyber attacks didn't harm vital systems'
An eye for an eye a hack for a hack
El Al and Tel Aviv Stock Exchange websites hacked
Digital Jihad: Palestinain resistance in the digital era, page 95