Cyber attacks against Israel continue

Cyber attacks against Israel continued this week with the websites of its stock exchange and national airline El Al both hit.

According to nydailynews.com, neither website contains sensitive information and neither services nor trading were affected.

El Al Israel Airlines took down its website after the attack and said in a statement that it was taking security measures to protect it and that disruptions on the site were to be expected.

Orna Goren, a spokeswoman for the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, said its site was overwhelmed by electronic requests that slowed it down dramatically, but it was still operating.

Last week, the Bank of Israel's Banking Supervision Department confirmed that the information from around 15,000 active accounts had been exposed, with around 11,000 credit card numbers published online two days later.

Israeli deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon said such cyber attacks are "a breach of sovereignty comparable to a terrorist operation, and must be treated as such".

The San Francisco Chronicle said that the hacker 'oxOmar', who claimed responsibility for posting the details of the 20,000 Israeli credit cards, sent a warning to Israel's Ynet news outlet that a group of pro-Palestinian cyber attackers called Nightmare planned to bring down the site.

At the time of writing, the site remains online.

An Israeli hacker, identifying himself as a soldier in an Israeli intelligence unit, retaliated by posting information online about hundreds of Saudis, Egyptians, Syrians and others.

This article originally appeared at scmagazineuk.com