Gaza Team, a Palestinian-friendly group of hackers, hacked The Jewish Press — The site displayed a black backdrop with a man holding ISIS-type flag. The team vows to hack many more Pro-Israel websites in future.
On 14th April 2015, a pro-Israel Jewish Press newspaper was hacked by a group that calls itself ‘Gaza hacker Team.’
The visitors to this website were welcomed by a black screen displaying the image of a man sitting on horseback and holding a flag just like the ISIS’s. The page has red and green colored Arabic writing, which Google translated as a warning to Pro-Israel websites by the hackers.
One sentence depicted on the hacked website was translated as:
“Death to your entity mutant named ‘Israel.’” Moreover, an Arabic chant also continuously played making the environment quite eerie.
Link of targeted website along with its zone-h mirror as a proof of hack is available below:
http://www.jewishpress.com
http://www.zone-h.org/mirror/id/24050827?zh=1
Paul Goldenberg, a cybersecurity expert, stated that the threat shouldn’t be underestimated and the Jewish community is highly vulnerable to such attacks, according to The Jewish Week.
He explained: “The Jewish community is unlike any other community with regard to cyber threats.”
Goldenberg is the cofounder of the SCN/Secure Community Network. SCN was founded in 2004 and is a non-profit organization created to beef up US-based Jewish institutions’ security.
According to Goldenberg, SCN so far has tracked various threats from nation states such as Iran, Lebanon and Pakistan along with identifying non-state actors like neo-Nazi and Palestinian groups.
He believes that a cyberattack induced profound long-term impact on the reliability and resiliency of any company. “Senior administrators need to understand that if systems go down, the names of children in their camps or the financial information of their donors could get into the hands of those seeking to do harm,” says Goldenberg.
A tech consultant who has been working with Jewish firms on app development and digital strategy, Russel Neiss, states that The Jewish Press website was vulnerable already. Neiss revealed that the website utilized plugins having documented vulnerabilities.
In an email, Neiss wrote, “the ‘hack’ likely exploited these known issues and is most probably not the work of some skilled attackers, but rather automated using freely downloadable software found from around the internet. This sort of attack should be easily avoidable with only a small amount of prevention by a staff member of the organization with a moderate amount of technological knowledge or an attentive contractor.”
At the time of publishing this article, The Jewish press website was restored.
