The Jerusalem Post reports that the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) movement’s main, expert hacker has been indicted by an Israeli judge.
The Palestinian hacker, Maaged Ben Juwad Oydeh was formally charged by the judge at the Beersheba District Court after he was arrested by Israeli forces earlier this year. Oydeh has been accused of several offenses including the hacking of airports, CCTV video footages, drones, cell phone networks and most importantly the database of Israel Interior Ministry.
Must Read: This is how hacked Israeli drone feeds look like
Oydeh’s Story- From a Radio Station Manager to PIJ’s Frontline Hacker:
According to the information contained in courts documents, the accused joined PIJ while he was a teenager. His initial tasks included managing the radio station of the PIJ. He received salary every month for his services.
Eventually, his technical skills got polished and he learned to hack CCTV cameras that were installed on roads in Israel. After witnessing his proficiency in hacking, the group’s leadership gave him the task of hacking the Road Safe Authority of Israel and download video footages from the cameras installed on the roads onto his laptop.
Soon the PIJ’s leadership understood that Oydeh was quite talented and so he was tasked to hack Israel Defense Forces’ UAVs, which means drones. His first two attempts yield no success but he did succeed ultimately when he tried for the third time in 2011.
The objective of targeting IDF’s UAVs was to identify their accurate positions and obtain video feeds. However, when in 2014 the UAVs were updated by the IDF then the video feeds could no longer be obtained via Oydeh’s technique.
In 2013, Oydeh was given the task of hacking into cell phones that worked on the Jawwal mobile network in Palestine as well as Israel’s Orange Mobile and Cellcom networks. The campaign was aimed at detecting Israeli spies who were hiding in Gaza. However, only the Jawwal network was hacked by Oydeh.
The Ben-Gurion Airport was also hacked by Oydeh in 2013. The reason behind this hack was to receive video feeds and information about flights and/or to plan rocket strikes. Finally, in 2015, Oydeh hacked into Israel Interior Ministry’s database to get information about rebels who could be recruited there.
