A group of Israeli hackers claimed on Tuesday that they hacked into the websites of the Saudi Arabian and United Arab Emirates’ stock exchanges, Channel 10 News reported.
The hackers said the attacks came as revenge for Monday’s attacks by the Hacker “OxOmar,” dubbed the “Saudi Hacker,” who brought down the El Al and Tel Aviv Stock Exchange websites.
The Israeli group, which called itself “IDF-Team”, posted a message to the Pastebin website in which they claimed to have brought down the two sites “because lame hackers from Saudi Arabia decided to launch an attack against Israeli sites.”
The hackers added, “If the lame attacks from Saudi Arabia will continue, we will move to the next level which will disable these sites” for a longer period of time, weeks or even months.
Earlier on Tuesday, hackers claiming to be from Kurdistan or Iraq invaded the websites of the community of Shiloh in Samaria and of Israel’s ally Azerbaijan.
The “hacking war” began when a Saudi-based hacker published the credit card details of thousands of Israelis.
The same hacker later called on Arab hackers to unite against Israel, and focus their efforts on the websites of the Israeli military and security agencies. He also encouraged hackers to break into various Israeli websites and steal credit card numbers. “We will fight you and hurt you in any way possible,” he was quoted as having warned Israelis.
Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon’s site was also breached by hackers, who didn’t manage to do much more than put a 30-minute dent in the site's defenses. Ayalon’s site was back up and running normally within half an hour.
Late last week, hackers broke into the Israel Fire and Rescue Services website and put up anti-Israel text and images. This time, the hackers claimed to be based in Gaza. The hackers identified themselves as the Gaza Hacker Team.
The Israeli Defense Ministry has announced that it will establish a special cyber warfare administration to deal with the new threats. Hamas, meanwhile, has called for an escalation of hacking against Israel, saying these acts open “a new field of resistance and the beginning of an electronic war against Israeli occupation.”