Internet hacktivist group Anonymous has declared cyberwar on Israel, posting personal data of five thousand Israeli officials online.

 

The group used their Anonpaste.me site to address a message to the Israeli government before linking to the page with names, ID numbers and personal emails of 5,000 officials. 

 

The message said: "It has come to our attention that the Israeli government has ignored repeated warnings about the abuse of human rights, shutting down the internet in Israel and mistreating its own citizens and those of its neighboring countries." 

 

The group also said "Israeli Gov. this is/will turn into a cyberwar." 

 

Earlier, the group hacked over 700 hundred Israeli websites, including the Bank of Jerusalem, the Israeli Defence Ministry, the IDF blog, the President's official website and many others. 

Most of the sites remain down. 

 

The country’s finance minister has acknowledged the recent wave of attacks, saying the government is now waging a war on a “second front.”

 

Over the past four days, Israel has “deflected 44 million cyber-attacks on government websites,” Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz told AP.

 

The message says: 

 

 

 

 

Hacker group Anonymous has launched a massive attack named #OpIsrael on almost 700 Israeli websites, protesting against Operation Pillar of Defense in Gaza. Israeli media confirmed the group’s move.

 

The hackers reportedly took down websites ranging from high-profile governmental structures such as the Foreign Ministry to local tourism companies’ pages.

 

The biggest attack as of now has been the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s international development program, titled Mashav. Anonymous announced on Twitter they’ve hacked into the program’s database, with the website remaining inaccessible at the moment.

 

“There is [sic] so many defaced Israeli websites right now, that we just made a list of them,” Anonymous tweeted. 

 

The hacktivists also took down the Israeli President's official website and the blog of the country's Defense Force, www.idfblog.com, posting the news on Twitter using their infamous #TANGO DOWN hashtag. 

 

The Jerusalem Post has confirmed the group’s assault, including the attack on the Foreign Ministry’s website, as well as those of Kadima party, Bank of Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv Municipality.

 

The latter is online as of now. Among other functions, it provides residents with directions to bomb shelters. Meanwhile, the majority of the web pages that were taken down were blank, but some showed pro-Palestinian images and messages, Jerusalem Post reported.

 

It was mentioned, however, that most of the 663 pages on the list were subdomains of the same site, and many proved to be still online and functioning properly.

 

Most of the sites were simply unavailable, but others displayed pro-Palestinian images and messages. One site whose front page was replaced with an image of a man wearing a Palestinian kaffiye, displayed a message reading: "This attack is in response to the Injustice against the Palestinian people."

 

From the very beginning of the Israeli offensive, Anonymous has avidly supported the Palestinian people.

 

On Wednesday, they said in a press statement, "For far too long, Anonymous has stood by with the rest of the world and watched in despair the barbaric, brutal and despicable treatment of the Palestinian people in the so called 'Occupied Territories' by the Israel Defense Force."

 

 

Amid the conflict, which has already claimed at least 33 lives, 30 of them Palestinians, Anonymous also pledged to help those who are at the heart of the conflict: many Palestinians were left without electricity, and consequently, without internet access.

 

The hackers gave instructions on their Twitter account for residents to get reconnected: “If you have friends in Gaza who still have phone, but need internet, give them these dial-up numbers and instructions: http://pastebin.com/6dYQruHu.”

 

Anonymous put together a “Gaza Care Package,” which contains instructions in Arabic and English to assist Palestinians in the event that the Israeli government cuts their internet connection.

 

Plus, the package includes information on evading IDF surveillance, along with first aid information. The collective encouraged Palestinians to download and share the package with others.

 

Anonymous members also contacted Israeli forces directly. A tweet from an Anonymous account to an IDF spokesperson warned, “It would be wise of you to expect us”, while a statement on their webpage said, “Stop bombing Gaza. Millions of Israelis and Palestinians are lying awake, exposed and terrified.”

 

 

Hacker group, Anonymous, has launched hacking attacks on websites owned by the Israeli government in retaliation against the ongoing Israeli military campaign on the Gaza Strip.

 

“There is so many defaced Israeli websites right now, that we just made a list of them,” Anonymous tweeted.

 

The group’s Twitter account, @YourAnonNews, urged followers to help crash over 40 sites of the Israeli government and military.

 

Anonymous announced its plan to crash and deface websites of the Israeli Defense Forces and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, among others belonging to security and financial companies, the Global Post reported.

 

Lack of electricity across Gaza meant many were left out of touch, but the hackers gave instructions on their twitter account for residents to get reconnected.

 

“If you have friends in Gaza who still have phone, but need internet, give them these dial-up numbers and instructions: http://pastebin.com/6dYQruHu” 

 

Anonymous posted a message on a site saying they took down Israel’s “top security and surveillance website.” 

 

The group said in a statement that it refuses to sit back while “a cowardly Zionist State” ruins innocent lives.

 

Despite the hackers’ claims to take down a list of sites, Forbes writer Andy Greenberg noted many were still online.

 

Some even went to the extent of deeming Anonymous’ mission as anti-Semitic. Journalist Aaron Marcus tweeted “Anonymous wants to shut down all websites with Hebrew, talk about walking in Hitler's footsteps.” 

 

Anonymous is known for their online attacks that cause traffic and consequential crashing of target sites.

 

The conflict has claimed over 20 lives so far, but has not been limited to the territory. Opposing leaders have lashed out at each other via Twitter.

 

Lawmakers in the Arab Emirates have introduced jail terms for all those who incite public protests and insult the state and its rulers online.

 

The Persian Gulf countries are tightening internet laws, fearing Arab Spring-style uprisings.

 

The news measures take the form of codes to monitor and enforce strict internet content guidelines to prevent “the deriding [of] or to damage the reputation or the stature of the state or any of its institutions." 

 

This includes any of the seven emirates that govern the country’s principalities and the president.

 

Furthermore, it rounds on “information, news, caricatures or any other kind of pictures" that could present a threat to “public order” and “disobey the laws and regulations of the state.”

 

Moreover, it punishes any person or organization calling for a demonstration or protest without the necessary license with a jail sentence.

 

Ironically, President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahayan signed off the decree just hours after he was granted a seat on the UN Human Rights Council for the next three years.

 

The Arab uprisings that swept the Middle East largely bypassed the Persian Gulf’s authoritarian regimes; the UAE in particular has not seen any street protests since the social unrest began over a year ago. But the crackdowns on internet freedoms in several countries in the Gulf betray concern that their regimes may go through a similar social upheaval. 

 

Under the guise of a probe into foreign-linked groups planning “crimes against the security of the state,” the UAE’s authorities have detained around 60 Islamist dissidents since the beginning of the year.

 

Back in August the UAE’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash slammed criticism against the measures, condemning them as attempts to slander UAE "with very little reference to our many achievements.”

 

The UAE along with Saudi Arabia and Bahrain remain virtually untouched by Western government criticism of their authoritarian regimes and measures restricting freedom of expression.

 

Social networking sites and forums have become a new platform for citizens in these countries to voice opinions on their rulers.

 

Twitter, for example, has gained huge popularity in Saudi Arabia since it was unblocked in 2008 and the country has the fastest growing number of users in the world, according to its CEO. In response to the growing social phenomenon, Gulf leaders have sought to restrict internet freedoms with strict legislation.

 

Say goodbye to online service providers protecting the identities of their users. With just a bit of begging, a Texas-based intelligence firm succeeded in convincing Skype to send over sensitive account data pertaining to a teenage WikiLeaks fan.

 

Reports out of Amsterdam this week suggest that Microsoft-owned Skype didn’t wait for a court order or warrant with a judge’s signature before it handed over the personal info of a 16-year-old Dutch boy.

 

The youngster was suspected of being involved in Operation Payback, an Anonymous-endorsed initiative that targeted the servers of PayPal, Visa, Mastercard and others after those companies blocked WikiLeaks from receiving online payment backs in December 2010.

 

When hacktivists responded to the blockade by overflowing the servers of those sites with distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, PayPal asked Dallas, Texas’ iSIGHT Partners Inc., a self-described“global cyber intelligence firm,” to investigate.

 

It appears that iSIGHT didn’t have deals with just PayPal either. Skype is also a client of the online private eye, and they reached out to the chat company for assistance.

 

Normally the court would enter the equation here and write out a warrant to try and track down that information, but the initial report by Brenno de Winter of Nu.nl reveals that investigators skipped that step.

 

According to English-language transcription of Winter’s account, “the police file notes that Skype handed over the suspect's personal information, such as his user name, real name, e-mail addresses and the home address used for payment.” While that in it of itself isn’t all that unusual, Winter writes that Skype sent over that information voluntarily, “without a court order, as would usually be required.”

 

Joep Gommers, the senior director of global research from iSIGHT, defended the action to Winter, admitting, "On occasion, we share our research findings with relevant law enforcement parties as a public service, just as you would report what appeared to be a crime that you witnessed in your neighborhood.”

 

In emails obtained by Winter, Gommers bragged of his findings to Dutch authorities, writing after he first received assistance from Skype, "Hey, I will have login information soon – but not yet."

 

Skype doesn’t stand by the move, though, and says any virtual handshake between one of their staffers and iSIGHT doesn’t fit with the company’s practices when it terms to protecting private user info.

 

“It is our policy not to provide customer data unless we are served with valid request from legal authorities, or when legally required to do so, or in the event of a threat to physical safety,” Skype said in a statement to Nu.nl.

 

Commenting to Slate, a representative for the chat service noted that it has worked with iSIGHT in the past to “combat spam and malware,” but acknowledged “it appears that some information may have been inappropriately passed on to Dutch authorities without our knowledge.”

 

Now Skype says they are conducting an internal investigation to see why their privacy policies were ignored and the teenager’s info was sent to iSIGHT, but it might be too late for the company.

 

Other hacktivists that already had a bone to pick with PayPal and other targets of Operation Payback now have their sights set on Gommers and the intelligence company.

 

In a post published to the AnonNews.org website, one user asks other hacktivists to help find out more about iSIGHT and what damage they may have already done as an intelligence firm willing to bend the rules for helping their high-profile customers.

 

“It has recently come to our attention that a security company known as isightpartners has been providing sensitive user information obtained from their customers to governments around the world to target activists linked to Anonymous,” one user writes.

 

“We seek your assistance and demand answers to this activity. Who are isightpartners other customers they are using to target Anons? How long has isightpartners targeted Anonymous?

 

These are questions we must answer. isightparters declared war on Anonymous so we must declare war on them.”

 

Meanwhile, others are unsure of what good the data will do for iSIGHT or PayPal since it could have been obtained illegally.

 

"You would imagine that subscriber data aren't simply handed over. They have to be provided when the police has a valid demand or court order, but not in any other case,” Gerrit-Jan Zwenne, a professor of Law and Information Society in Leiden and a lawyer at Bird & Bird in The Hague, tells Winter.

 

"You can also wonder whether police can use that information if it was acquired this way.”

 

Earlier this year, Skype came under attack by privacy advocates for failing to answer questions about whether or not authorities can access thought-to-be private conversations carried over the chat client.

 

In June, Microsoft had a patent approved for the “legal intercept” of online communications, allowing them the ability to “silently copy communication transmitted via the communication session” without asking for user authorization.

 

When Ryan Gallagher of Slate asked Skype to explain if they were using that patent already this July, he was met with rampant refusals to answer the magazine’ questions.

 

“But when I repeatedly questioned the company on Wednesday whether it could currently facilitate wiretap requests, a clear answer was not forthcoming. Citing ‘company policy,’ Skype PR man Chaim Haas wouldn’t confirm or deny, telling me only that the chat service ‘co-operates with law enforcement agencies as much as is legally and technically possible,’” Gallagher wrote.

 

Meanwhile, last month a federal judge ruled that the US Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) will have to go back and more adequately respond to a Freedom of Information Act request for information involving any of the DoJ’s efforts to make back-door access for authorities mandatory in future chat protocol updates across the board through an initiative referred to as “Going Dark.”

 

Seven members of an elite U.S. Navy SEAL (Sea, Air, and Land) team, including one who participated in the raid that killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, have been reprimanded for disclosing classified material while helping produce a videogame.

 

All seven of the special operations forces who were punished were members of the elite SEAL Team Six, according to CBS News, which first reported the reprimands. CBS said the seven worked for two days this spring and summer as paid consultants on the videogame.

 

Two senior chief special operators and five chief special operators received a reprimand on Nov. 7 for their involvement in the production of a videogame entitled “Medal of Honor: Warfighter,” released by game maker Electronic Arts Inc, said a Navy official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

 

 All seven were punished in an administrative proceeding for disclosing classified information and misusing command gear while working with the game makers, who advertise that the videogame is more accurate because of the help they had from special operations forces.

 

The seven each received a punitive letter of reprimand and were docked half pay for two months, a Navy official said.

 

A defense official said all Pentagon employees are required to follow Defense Department guidance on outside employment, a measure put into place to ensure “the highest ethical behavior.”

 

Some people logging onto Twitter on Thursday were greeted with word that their passwords were reset due to concerns their accounts may have been breached by hackers.

 

The San Francisco-based one-to-many text messaging service said the routine security precaution was accidentally applied to more users than intended.

 

Twitter did not specify the number of accounts involved.

 

"When we believe an account may have been compromised, we reset the password and send an email letting the account owner know this has happened along with information about creating a new password," Twitter told AFP.

 

"In this case, we unintentionally reset passwords of a larger number of accounts, beyond those that we believed to have been compromised." Twitter apologized for any confusion caused by password resets. Internet security specialists advise people to regularly change passwords on accounts to thwart hackers.

 

Twitter on Thursday also posted a "bug alert" telling users that it was working to fix problems with disappearing "tweets" and direct messages at the service.

 

"Our engineers are hard at work to solve these issues," the Twitter support team said in a blog post.

 

Young people warned they are likely to lose control of sexually explicit material once they have posted it online

 

Children and young people are posting thousands of sexually explicit images of themselves and their peers online, which are then being stolen by porn websites, according to a leading internet safety organisation.

 

A study by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) reveals that 88% of self-made sexual or suggestive images and videos posted by young people, often on social networking sites, are taken from their original online location and uploaded on to other websites.

 

Reams of sexually explicit images and videos are being uploaded by children and young people, the study found. During 47 hours, over a four-week period, a total of 12,224 images and videos were analysed and logged.

 

The majority of these were then mined by "parasite websites" created for the sole purpose of displaying sexually explicit images and videos of young people.

 

The original pictures and videos were uploaded by young people on to commonplace websites but then stolen by porn sites for display. Of the 12,224 images and videos monitored on 68 different websites, 10,776 were later found on parasite websites.

 

Organisations warned children and young people of the dangers of "sexting" – sending sexually explicit texts or emails – and allowing friends to take suggestive pictures or video of them.

 

Young people had to be aware that once an image was available digitally the image was no longer under their control, said Susie Hargreaves, CEO of the Internet Watch Foundation, set up in 1996 by the internet industry.

 

"This research gives an unsettling indication of the number of images and videos on the internet featuring young people performing sexually explicit acts or posing," she said.

 

"It also highlights the problem of control of these images – once an image has been copied on to a parasite website, it will no longer suffice to simply remove the image from the online account.

 

"We need young people to realise that once an image or a video has gone online, they may never be able to remove it entirely."

 

The charity gave examples of children whose lives had been devastated because sexually explicit images and videos of them were available online.

 

One young woman explained that she had taken a sexually explicit image of herself when she was 15. She had not posted it to the internet herself but it was now freely available online.

 

"[It] could jeopardise any future career I have or if any family [or] friends come across it," she said.

 

Another found explicit photos of herself online after her phone was stolen, while another admitted to attempting suicide after losing control of sexually explicit images: "I came to regret posting photographs of myself naively on the internet and tried to forget about it, but strangers recognised me from the photographs and made lewd remarks at school," she said.

 

"I endured so much bullying because of this photograph and the others … I was eventually admitted for severe depression and was treated for a suicide attempt."

 

The organisation has been contacted by young people who want them to help remove explicit photos online. One wrote: "Please remove this from the internet as soon as possible as one family member has already come across it … I feel like ending my life as I am so ashamed and embaressed [sic] and this has been put up without my concent [sic]."

 

Of the sexual content monitored by IWF, 7,147 were images while 5,077 were videos. UK Safer Internet Centre, a group that campaigns for responsible internet use, will use the research to inform new campaigns aimed at children.

 

But the organisation warned that if it cannot provide watertight proof that the young person in a sexually explicit image is under 18 they have no power to remove it from the internet.

 

Sarah Smith, technical researcher at IWF, said the charity had not been surprised by the amount of sexually explicit material available, but added they were shocked by the number of parasite websites taking advantage of images online.

 

"Young people have to realise that once they take a digital image, once it is uploaded, it essentially becomes public property and is virtually impossible to remove," she said. "The clear message is that if you post this content you are going to lose control of it."

 

Will Gardner, director of UK Safer Internet Centre at Childnet, said adults had a responsibility to ensure children and young people knew about the dangers of posting suggestive or sexual images of themselves online.

 

"In all of our work we see that conversations and education with young people are vital in helping them to stay safe online," he said.

 

The organisation has developed a drama-based education programme to address "sexting" and support teachers in starting a dialogue with pupils "to help young people think about, role play and understand the consequences of creating and sending indecent images", he added.

 

David Wright, the director of UK Safer Internet Centre at South West Grid for Learning, said it was not uncommon for children to "sext" despite warnings from adults. "Much of the advice for children and young people is, quite rightly, to not 'sext'," he said.

 

"However, this research, coupled with our experience, demonstrates that it is still not uncommon. We hope that our new resource will help and support those who have shared self-generated content to take positive action."