Jew World Order

Hackers claiming to be Saudis have posted the credit-card information of thousands of Israelis on the internet, in what appears to be a politically motivated attack.

The Israeli Ynet news website said that the hackers called the cyber attack a “gift to the world for the new year” that they hoped “would hurt the Zionist pocket”.

They claimed to have compromised 400,000 credit-card holders, but Israel’s central bank said that only about 15,000 active cards were affected.

Cyber expert Gadi Evron told the Associated Press that it would be almost impossible to verify that the attackers were Saudi.

Evron, who once oversaw security for the Israeli government internet provider, said that the attack was “nothing special” technically, and was mundane, given the millions of credit-card numbers stolen online daily.

“Potentially, such attacks could be devastating,” he said. “This is not one of them.”

It focused attention again about potential dangers for consumers in using electronic commerce services, he said, and demonstrated how relatively simple attacks could affect an entire country.

Ynet said that the information was posted on an Israeli sports website, and was removed shortly after it appeared. Credit-card companies said they blocked internet purchases on the compromised cards, and would issue replacement cards soon.

Israeli security officials said that Israel’s Shin Bet internal security agency has a special unit that advises sensitive sectors considered vital to security, like public utilities, about internet security. It recently added banks and mobile-phone companies.

Evron said that Israel, a high-tech powerhouse, is one of the most frequently hacked countries in the world, although the attacks are generally not sophisticated. Many of the attacks are linked to pro-Palestinian or pro-Arab hackers, he said.

“As a rule, whenever there is some sort of ethnic or political tension around the world … you can guarantee that two days later or an hour later, for at least a few weeks, there are going to be some kind of online attacks going on,” Evron said.

There have been no confirmed reports of sensitive Israeli government sites being hacked. Several weeks ago, websites of Israeli spy services and other official sites briefly went down, but the government denied that pro-Palestinian hackers were to blame, and characterised the event as a technical malfunction.