Amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine, a new battleground has opened up in cyberspace, with hackers from both sides trying to attack each other’s infrastructure, while also dragging supporters of each other into the conflict.
“Analysts have noted public instances of DDoS attacks, website defacements, and increased dark web discussions from various threat actor groups,” said Ian Gray, vice president of cyber threat intelligence operations at Flashpoint. “Ongoing physical conflict within the region is likely to attract additional hacktivist groups that are either ideologically, politically, or opportunistically supporting either Israel or Palestine.”
Data from Cloudflare, a leading cloud delivery network, shows signs of cyberattacks in the form of DDoS attacks impacting both Israel and Palestine.
“Two autonomous systems in the Gaza Strip went offline a few hours after the Hamas attacks on October 7. Subsequently, on October 9, two additional networks also experienced outages. We also saw an uptick in cyberattacks targeting Israel, including a 1.26 billion HTTP requests DDoS attack, and Palestine,” Cloudflare said in a blog post.
Leading the pro-Palestine offensive are a couple of Russian-backed hacker groups — Killnet and Anonymous Sudan — who took to Telegram and claimed responsibility for the recent attacks on Israeli government websites and the Jerusalem Post, respectively. Anonymous Sudan also claimed responsibility for targeting Israel’s Iron Dome, the country’s all-weather, air defense system.
Other hacktivist groups have also joined the conflict. On October 7, pro-Palestine hacktivist group Mysterious Team Bangladesh announced its support for Hamas on Telegram, using trending pro-Palestinian hashtags including #FreePalestine and #OpIsraelV2.
