Anonymous enters Israel-Hamas cyber war, takes down 40 Israeli sites

The hostilities between Israel and Hamas have found a new battleground: social media. And Israel has found a new adversary: Anonymous, the loose hacker collective that has carried out cyber attacks on a number of prominent targets including government websites in a number of countries across the world, including India. Reacting to a threat by the Israeli military to cut off Internet access to Palestinian territories in the disputed Gaza strip, Anonymous claimed via Twitter to have attacked over 40 Israeli government and military websites, defacing them with an image of Gaza in flames and a message that read, “Stop bombing Gaza! Millions of Israelis & Palestinians are lying awake, exposed and terrified. We have taken down your top security and surveillance website down” [caption id=“attachment_525865” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  The message left on Israeli sites that Anonymous claims to have hacked[/caption] The group tweeted out this pastebin list of all the surveillance and security websites it claims to have attacked. https://twitter.com/YourAnonNews/status/269236812453662720 It also issued a press statement which said, “when the government of Israel publicly threatened to sever all Internet and other telecommunications into and out of Gaza they crossed a line in the sand. As the former dictator of Egypt Mubarack learned the hard way – we are ANONYMOUS and NO ONE shuts down the Internet on our watch. To the IDF and government of Israel we issue you this warning only once. Do NOT shut down the Internet into the “Occupied Territories”, and cease and desist from your terror upon the innocent people of Palestine or you will know the full and unbridled wrath of Anonymous. And like all the other evil governments that have faced our rage, you will NOT survive it unscathed” You can read the full statement here The New York Times reported however that despite the groups claims, it had only been successful in targeting a few sites. On the subject of the attacks themselves, it says, “The attacks, while not technically sophisticated, can be difficult to thwart. The best the owner of a site under attack can hope for is to get between the targeted site and the attacking site. But blocking the attack is nearly impossible because of the innumerable sites on the Internet on which Anonymous can post their attack tools.”