Hackers who were thought to have linked to Russia and Iran made unsuccessful attempts to sabotage Israeli rocket alert applications during a bout of violence with Gazan terrorists earlier this month, according to Telegram messages seen by The Times of Israel.
The bid to shut down the life-saving early warning network by the so-called Anonymous Sudan group and an Iranian hacking collective known as Asa Musa — Persian for Moses Staff — managed only to take some ancillary websites offline temporarily, without affecting the official mechanism that alerts Israelis to incoming missile attacks via siren and phone notification.
However, it did underline a growing threat for Israel from what appeared to be cooperation between hackers and Palestinian attackers, with Tehran’s fingerprints evident on both keyboards and rocket launchers.
“There will be rockets and cyberattacks at the same time,” one person claiming to be a hacker linked to Iran told the owner of rocket warning app Cumta, which was targeted in the May 2 hack.
With violence between Israel and Gaza erupting anew last week, following the initial flareup, hackers have continued boasting of being able to harm Israel’s civil defense infrastructure; though the strategy of overwhelming servers hosting government websites and third-party apps is unlikely to affect much damage, there still may be cause for concern.
On Saturday, Gedera residents received faulty rocket alert warnings on their phones, leading the military to recommend users reinstall their alert apps, the Kan broadcaster reported. Though no cause for the malfunction was given, it came amid already rampant speculation that Iran is attempting to boost its cyber capabilities, possibly under Russian tutelage.
The initial hacking attempts came on May 2, as Palestinian Islamic Jihad-led fighters launched dozens of missiles at towns near Gaza to avenge the death of an accused senior terror official who had been on a hunger strike in an Israeli prison.
Moments after a barrage of dozens of rockets, Anonymous Sudan claimed on Telegram that it had hacked Cumta and fellow rocket alert application RedAlert, both of which are privately developed and privately managed phone apps that duplicate official Home Front Command alerts. They also claimed to take down the website of Tel Aviv-based Evigilo, a private company that provides emergency notification services to the Home Front Command as well as other major clients worldwide, and the landing page of Halamish, a government company focused on urban renewal projects. The assaults took the form of distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks, which can take a website offline by flooding a server with data requests, albeit without damaging any internal infrastructure.
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