Cyber-attacks
against Israel have increased 500% in the last month and in a new
report it is written that a powerful botnet is controlled by a
pro-Islamic Iranian group of hackers and was used as part of a
cyber-campaign with the support of Anonymous.
The
increase in attacks coincided with the launch of Israel's Operation
Protective Edge offensive against Gaza.
Following
three weeks of intensive attacks on the ground and in cyberspace, the
volume of DDoS attacks decreased on 27 July, this coincided with a
temporary ceasefire in fighting between Israel and Gaza.
The
attack method (which uses things such as "malformed DNS
queries", "layer-7 HTTP and HTTP/S attacks", and
"repeated page downloads and GETs/POSTs against non-existent
URIs") has a "striking resemblance to the Brobot-based
attacks" which have been first seen in 2012, but which have been
silent for almost a year.
Brobot
is a powerful botnet (network of zombie computers) which was first
used in 2012 as part of Operation Ababil, which was a series of
cyber-attacks carried out by the Qassam Cyber Fighters (also known as
the Cyber fighters of Izz Ad-Din Al Qassam) against US financial
institutions and continued until July 2013.
Brobot
is being used to attack Israeli civilian governmental agencies,
military agencies, financial services and Israeli cc TLD DNS
infrastructure, and as the Israeli-Gaza conflict continues to evolve,
it is likely that we will see the cyber-conflict also evolve
alongside it.
