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January 18, 2010

Calling themselves the Palestinian Mujaheeds, hackers who posted a rant against Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip have defaced the Jewish Chronicle Web site over the weekend. They managed to upload an image of the Palestinian flag alongside diatribes against Israeli security policy. The hacked home page of the site also attempted to play an MP3 file.

Following the attack on Sunday, the website was taken offline for repairs but returned today with a story on the attack, downplaying the significance of the admitted breach.

The site's webmaster said that "only those without the confidence to win an argument resort to such tactics. And it was a pretty self-defeating attempt to silence us. Our site was down for a few hours, but as a result we will get more readers than ever before."

Based in London, the Jewish Chronicle is the world's longest-running Jewish newspaper. "Only thejc.com site was affected. None of the other 'sister' servers handling the archives, e-paper, social and personal, debating and MSFL sport were infiltrated," the paper reports.

Attackers using the same Palestinian Mujaheeds nickname also hacked an Israeli weather website, www.israelweather.co.il posting their name on parts of the site that would normally display weather satellite images instead.

Overall, defacing websites with political messages isn't something new and has been going on for many years now. Previous examples include the hacking of a U.S. military website, which was defaced to display an image of a Palestinian protestor in front of an Israeli tank, exactly twelve months ago.

More recently, Twitter and Chinese search engine Baidu were the victims of a DNS hijacking by the "Iranian Cyber Army".

Visitors going to the sites were forwarded to a 3rd party website protesting against Western cyberactivism following 2009's highly disputed Iranian elections in September.

We will continue to monitor the situation closely, as some Internet security analysts expect more of this to happen in the coming weeks.

We will keep you posted.

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Source: The Jewish Chronicle.

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