Mossad targeted in major cyber attack

The Hebrew-language Maariv daily newspaper reported that various Israeli websites, including those of Mossad and the so-called National Insurance Institute, which is responsible for the social security of Israeli settlers, were knocked offline due to a widespread cyber attack by a hacker group calling itself Anonymous Sudan on Monday.

“This attack is in preparation for a much more significant [cyber] attack,” the group wrote on its Telegram channel.

The development came only two days after the group targeted the websites of a major airport port as well as the largest supplier of electrical power across the Israeli-occupied territories in a massive cyber attack.

Hebrew-language media outlets reported at the time that the Anonymous Sudan hacker group took down the websites of Ben Gurion International Airport and Israel Electric Corporation (IEC) on Saturday.

The reports added that the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, during which websites are targeted by overwhelming their servers with too many requests to connect, made the websites unavailable for a while, before they were brought back into service.

“We have not forgotten our Eid gift for Israel. There will be a major [cyber] attack, and it will bring down a large part of infrastructure in Israel. We will attack at any moment,” the group wrote on its Telegram channel.

Also, an Indonesian hacker group carried out a massive cyber attack against a number of Israeli websites last week, including those of the ministries of foreign affairs, education and health.

The Jerusalem Post spaper reported that the group, calling itself VulzSecTeam, announced on April 17 that it had managed to break into the websites of the Israeli education, health and foreign ministries, as well as Israel police and bus and train companies in recent days, and took them down.