BICOM

Israel faced escalating cyber attacks yesterday as unknown attackers disrupted access to the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and El Al, Israel’s national airline.

A hacker identifying himself only as ‘oxOmar,’ already notorious in Israel for posting the details of more than 20,000 Israeli credit cards, sent an overnight warning to Israel’s Ynetnews outlet that a group of pro-Palestinian cyber attackers called ‘Nightmare’ planned to bring down the sites in the morning.

The cyber-attack ended without causing much damage. While the sites were knocked offline for a few hours, as opposed to previous instances, this time the various sites’ core data was not stolen. The hackers tried to access the databases, but failed.

The cyber-attack by the Saudi hacker did, however, sow panic in the Israeli banking system. The First International Bank took the unprecedented measure of blocking access to its website to clients trying to do so from outside of Israel. Access to the Israel Discount Bank’s website from overseas was also temporarily blocked, and now other Israeli banks are considering taking a similar course of action.

Government officials who are responsible for information security yesterday called on the public to take the cyber-attacks in the right proportion and not to panic. “The State of Israel’s situation in the realm of information protection is quite good, and it is among the top five countries in the world on this issue. If there is a problem with the private sector, there are companies there that haven’t taking this issue seriously enough.”