On Jan. 17th, 2012, Oded Yaron and Iris Margulis reported for Haaretz on the ongoing cyberwar in Israel. After the news of an attack on Israel's stock exchange and #1 airline, Haaretz reports that Israeli hackers have taken down the website of the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange and the Saudi Stock Exchange. The Israeli hackers went by the name IDF-Team.
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On Jan. 17th, Aviv Mizrahi and Gadi Evron wrote a nice summary of the ongoing cyberwar for YNetNews. The article notes a few important points: it seems that these cyberattacks are coming from teenagers, not professional hackers; the initial success of hacker 0xOmar might have encouraged other cyberattacks; these hackers have only attacked websites, not databases; and 0xOmar likely stole Israeli credit card numbers from some third party website, not Israeli banks.
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Is this "cyberwar" really just a battle of the script-kiddies?
manoj narang
Its really bad news that hackers has hacked the website of Abu dhabi stock exchange..Its strange to know that hackers are not professional but teenagers..Programmers has to be very careful regarding the security reasons while designing the website..
Zach W.
Manoj,
Thanks for the comment. It’s certainly not a good thing that this cyberwar is going on. However, it’s important to remember that these cyberattacks have just been general DDOS attacks, not infiltration of the actual databases. It’s the difference between tearing down a bank poster and robbing the bank. DDOS attacks aren’t really hard to pull off, and generally involve overwhelming a website with requests. The simplicity of the attacks have led many to believe that teenagers (or at least younger people) are behind them. Nevertheless, you’re right: programmers do have to be very careful with regard to website security. We’ll see how this all plays out.