Binary battle royale

The Middle Eastern cyberwar dragged on Tuesday night and Wednesday with a victory for the Arab side, as pro-Palestinian hackers succeeded in taking down a handful of major Israeli websites.

The hackers successfully disabled, among others, the websites of newspaper Ha'aretz, medical centers Sheba and Assuta, and the public transportation company, Dan.

Ha'aretz and TheMarker, two newspapers owned by the Shocken Publishing company, had their sites taken down by a Palestinian hacker calling himself "Palestine Anonymous," who wrote on Twitter, "haaretz.co.il, tango down." Website staff at the newspapers were able to identify and then block the origin of the attack, eventually getting themselves back online.

Earlier on Wednesday, the Dan Public Transportation website came under attack, but according to a company official there were only brief disruptions in service and it was brought back to its regular operational state shortly after the hacking. Other sites, such as those for the Israel Festival and Gaash Spa, were vandalized with anti-Israel writings and pictures of the Saudi flag.

Prior to the Dan attack, the websites for two hospitals -- Sheba and Assuta -- also fell victim to attempted hacker sabotage. Sheba spokespeople said they had identified the source. "We worked to identify the origins and block the hostile activity, and the website was already back to being fully functional."

Assuta spokesman Dror Admon said, "The hackers failed in their attempt to infiltrate the hospital system, and there is no risk of patients' information being leaked," he said.

The websites were targeted with DDoS attacks. While hackers employ a suite of tools to interfere with a website's operation, the DDoS attack, or distributed-denial-of-service, is very common. The hacking simulates, or manages to manipulate, thousands upon thousands of users attempting to enter a site simultaneously, while the website under attack cannot discern between normal traffic and the traffic from the attack. As a result from an overload of traffic, the site collapses. Even if the website has defenses up, the preventative measures they would take would also shut the site down, once again achieving the hackers' goal to disable the web page.

Shai Blitzblau, managing director of Maglan Information Defense Technologies Ltd., offered a grim outlook on what is still in store for Israeli Web pages. "Pro-Palestinian hackers have tens of thousands of computers at their disposal to attack Israeli websites. Their computers are set up to work every day in the coming months," he said. Blitzblau predicts that dozens of other Israeli sites are likely to be disabled in the coming days.

Blitzblau claims that the attacks this week were perpetrated using the same computers that attacked the El Al Airlines and Israeli Stock Exchange websites two weeks ago. "The hackers are staying up to date with which websites are protected and opt to attack other pages. There are dozens of attacks on Israeli websites every day, but if they hit a small commercial website, their effect is not felt. On Tuesday, the Jerusalem Development Company was attacked," he said.

A few banks have also suffered attempted hacker attacks. As a preventative measure, the Bank of Israel recently issued a recommendation for banks to block access to their sites from multiple websites in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Algeria.

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