It appears that DoS attacks are a new weapon of choice by the Israeli far-right in its ongoing war against Israeli peace activists and human rights NGOs. Today, the New Israel Fund announced that a new campaign it announced on behalf of free speech and Israeli democracy, Lo Nistom (“We won’t shut up”) had its website felled by a DoS attack. This of course is a remarkably similar M.O. to the attacks which took down this blog and two Israeli blogs which exposed the identity of accused IDF tortuer, Doron Zahavi. Also similar is the use of foreign IP addresses to sustain the attack. In NIF’s case they originated in Australia. In my case, they originated in Russia, Lebanon and Texas (yes, Texas). A representative of NIF’s web host confirmed, as my web host confirmed that the complex nature of the attack indicates these were experienced hackers and not script kiddies, as many of my fellow Israeli activists had incorrectly surmised.
Isn’t it a delicious irony that an NGO campaign on behalf of free speech is assaulted by forces of darkness who desire speech only for themselves and their kind, but who would deny it to NIF. To this I say, we are all New Israel Fund. An attack on one is an attack on all. They will not shut our mouths. They will not silence our voices. We will have the last word concerning peace and justice and the resolution of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Their voice is poison. It will die aborning in their throats when real peace is someday at hand.
What will the Israeli police do about this attack? Nothing. What they always do in the face of far-right provocation.
If the attack from Texas interfered with anybody’s legitimate attempts to carry on their normal business, the Texas Rangers have a legal mandate to investigate.
The rightists almost certainly do not own the computers used to launch the attacks themselves: those will be infected botnets, but they probably do own the machines used to scan for targets and send instructions to launch the attacks. It’s a bit unlikely that this is their only illegal activity.
depends where the server is hosted and where the attacks originate from
good hackers use proxies, and unless commerce is halted, officials dont have the time or the resources to go after them
their purpose is to be a nuisance and to cause the hosts to spend time and money on increasing security….which they again quickly learn how to hack
Not completely true. I have some folks who are trying to penetrate the haze & learn something about the perpetrators.
Lebanon?
And Jordan too. Probably done that way on purpose. I’m sure as Medawar says the computers were bots controlled somehow from Israeli computers.