A coordinated cyber-attack on Israeli websites led by the international hacking group Anonymous has so far been relatively ineffective.
It announced that Monday would be “Operation Israel,” or “OpIsrael,” a day of targeting Israeli websites in retaliation for Israel’s “assault on the people of Gaza.”
“On April 7, 2014, we call upon our brothers and sisters to hack, deface, hijack, database leak, admin takeover, and DNS terminate the Israeli Cyberspace by any means necessary,” Anonymous said in a message posted on YouTube. “We will not stop until the police state becomes a free state and Palestine is free.”
The websites of the Israel postal service and the Education Ministry came down briefly, and the hackers also published on line a list of phone numbers, emails and passwords of senior Israeli officials.
Anonymous posted as message that Israel must “cease and desist any further military action and illegal settlements or the consequences will become worse with each passing hour.”
The attack comes exactly one year after an identical attack launched against Israel by Anonymous. Last year’s attack took down dozens of Israeli websites and saw published online a list of hundreds of Israeli email addresses and credit card numbers.