Global hacker network unites in Anonymous campaign against Israel

We recently reported on the revival of Operation Israel (#OpIsrael) being coordinated by a group of hackers aligned with Anonymous. The excellent information security blog Voice of Grey Hat subsequently detailed some of the known or suspected locations of participating entities: “The coalition of hackers appears to have ties to the Iranian government, Pakistan, Syria, Egypt, and the terror group Hezbollah, according to a report published by Cryptome.”

We wanted to corroborate and potentially add to the list of actors compiled in that report posted to Cryptome to see how it matches up with commentary about the campaign from recent weeks. Using Recorded Future, we generated a timeline of discussion on OpIsrael broken into rows by mention of different locations.

In addition to those called out by Voice of Grey Hat, the timeline reveals other locations related to suspected participants: Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, and Turkey. The Turkish connection adds a dash of internal conflict to the mix as a recent hack against Mossad claimed by RedHack, a Turkey-based organization, reportedly caused the primary arm of Anonymous Turkey to abandon their participation in OpIsrael.

Infighting aside (a bigger topic for another blog post), the above discoveries lead us to look for other hackers and recruiters with a history of attacks on Israel that haven’t yet been bubbled up in the Operation Israel discussion. What other hackers have been linked to attacks on Israel during the last four months that might take up the cause?

Picking through the network and ignoring some of the better recognized players such as Parastoo and AnonGhost we can highlight a few hacker links worth watching as the April 7 date for OpIsrael approaches:

• Commentary from Times of Israel in January 2013: “3Qrab Almoseam, Gaza Hacker Team, and CapoO_TunisiAnoO are the most political of the anti-Israel hackers, but there are many others. The difference is that they either don’t target Israel exclusively, or their messages aren’t specifically anti-Israel. For example, HTC 28 DZ hacks a lot of Israeli sites, but many of its recent messages encourage viewers to ‘respect the Prophet Mohammed’…”
• As reported by Hackread, there were a series of attacks against non-Israeli governments carried out in support of the Palestinian cause including TeaM MosTa hacking and defacing 62 Vietnamese government websites during January and Charaf Anons, a hacker of Anonymous Algeria, defacing ~900 Chinese websites as a protest against Israel last month.
• The Hackers Post reported on March 23 that Dr.SHA6H hacked and defaced the official website of Adidas sportswear ( www.adidas.co.il) website designated for Israel while El Periodico in January reported Saudi Arabian hackers going by Group-XP stole and published data of 14,000 Israeli credit cards stolen from an Israeli sports site.

Summing up the above details: there is a widely distributed network of known hackers uniting for OpIsrael; the public conflict between RedHack and Anonymous Turkey suggests the coordinated campaign set for April 7 is very real; and a sizable group of hackers with a history of attacking Israel remain either on the sidelines or unrecognized as participants by the security community, which suggests that there is potential for even more significant impact and reach.

We’ll watch this issue closely as the promoted April 7 event date approaches, and you can follow the latest or build off of these existing OpIsrael visualizations using Recorded Future.