Pro-Israeli hackers who call themselves "IDF-Team" are attempting to even the score after a recent spate of cyber attacks targeting Israel. On Wednesday, the hackers used distributed denial of service attacks against Saudi Stock Exchange (Tadawul) and the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange (ADX) websites. At the time of this writing, ADX appears to still be down while Tadawul seems to have recovered.
In this message uploaded to pastebin on Tuesday, the team of hackers also listed the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency website as a potential target. However, there have been no reports of any problems at SAMA.
The DDoS attacks serve as an eye-for-eye retaliation against similar attacks launched earlier this week against Israel's Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and El Al, the country's national airline. Those attacks also followed a number of previous incidents, including credit card leaks, government website defacement, compromised government SCADA systems and so on.
Interestingly, "IDF" is the same abbreviation used for the Israeli Defense Force. Recently, Israel's military claimed to have enlisted the help of 300 skilled computer experts to help defend against cyber attacks. While a connection is obvious, it is very unlikely that any military operatives would choose such a conspicuous name.
On Monday, a hacker who goes by the pseudonym "Hannibal" also uploaded his or her own paste (subject to removal) containing over 30,000 Saudi Facebook accounts. The message includes emails and corresponding passwords for all 30,000 accounts. Even more frightening, the hacker claims to have access to an astounding 10 million bank accounts, 4 million credit cards and 30 million Facebook accounts. The hacker made the following threats in the paste:
"State of Israel, not to worry, you're in the hands of the world's best hacker that I am.
I will continue to support the government of Israel will continue to attack the Arab countries
In addition, I received thousands of emails helpless Arabs, who are begging me to stop publishing the Facebook accounts because it violates their browsing experience. I have about 30 million e-mails of Arabs with passwords I'll post them throughout my life and my personal list is growing every day hundreds of thousands of emails
Also, I received hundreds of emails of senior politicians from France and other countries, who asked me not to publish the list of the 10 million my bank accounts.
So guys, if the state's chief Benny Gantz, or Prime Minister Netanyahu declare cyber war, I will have to publish the list of 10 million bank accounts. In addition I also have about 4 million credit cards. Just give a command and i will do it !! [sic]"
It appears we actually have a real "cyber war" going on between anti-Israel and pro-Israel hackers. We've already seen Israel's government respond to prior attacks, so it will be interesting to see how affected governments approach this unusual series of cyber attacks as they escalate.