Several Israeli Web Sites Down July 14, 2006 Fighting along Israel's border has led to hacker attacks against hundreds of sites.
The fighting along Israel's northern border with Lebanon has brought with it an upsurge in attacks on Israeli-related web sites in the past 24 hours, Israeli web sites reported Thursday. As the violence escalated, hackers from the Islamic world have targeted web sites hosted by all of Israel's major Internet service providers. To counter the threat, the ISPs added even more security to protect their servers from the latest round of digital warfare. Most of the attacks are coming from hackers located in Morocco and Turkey. "We witnessed hundreds of application layer attacks against Israeli-related web sites," said Ariel Pisetsky, manager of engineering and security at NetVision, one of Israel's leading ISPs. He added that this kind of attack has become increasingly prevalent in recent years. Local ISPs are deploying more aggressive security to deal with the threat. The latest onslaught came within hours of Wednesday morning's outbreak of hostilities. The hackers look for vulnerabilities on Israeli web sites and domains. They search for domains ending with the suffix co.il. Typically the hacker searches for file-uploading or scripting capabilities. Once the vulnerability of these capabilities is located, files are uploaded to deface the site. Rapid Response NetVision and other ISPs responded within a matter of minutes. "Our immediate response was to make it far more difficult for all users to enter the web sites," noted Mr. Pisetsky. In NetVision's case, the company immediately deployed two new security technologies that it began testing in recent weeks on a trial basis on the servers that had come under attack. Israeli ISPs are tightlipped about the latest security software systems they are deploying to counter the sharp rise in application layer attacks, but many are being developed by local startup companies. "This field of security is very hot and a number of local startups are focusing their attention on this space," said Dan Yachin, a Tel Aviv-based research director for emerging technologies at IDC. Gregory S. Williams [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply with a "Thank you" if you liked this post. _____________________________ MEDIANEWS mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
