Hackers have stepped up efforts to take down the websites of Israeli and Palestinian humanitarian groups since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7.The spike in cyberattacks on Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem has reached levels similar to activity seen during the conflict between Israel and Hamas in 2014, said Roy Yellin, the organization's director of public outreach. On top of the website attacks, B'Tselem has been facing online harassment in recent weeks. The personal mobile phone number of the organization's executive director was published online, and she received hundreds of calls and text messages, he said. B'Tselem promotes compliance with international law in Israel and the Palestinian territory and documents human rights violations. U.K.-based Medical Aid for Palestinians, which provides emergency relief to people in Gaza, said on X, formerly known as Twitter, that a cyberattack on its website was "An apparent attempt to prevent people donating towards our medical relief efforts." Israeli nonprofit United Hatzalah, which provides volunteer emergency medical services, posted on X that it had blocked access to its donation site from certain countries because of "a large number of cyber attacks against us." Civilian hacking during warfare between nations is also going on in conflicts between Russia and Ukraine and between Armenia and Azerbaijan, as well as in Sudan, said Tilman Rodenhäuser, a legal adviser at the International Committee of the Red Cross. "Today we see an unprecedented number of civilian hackers and hacktivists taking part in armed conflicts," he said. The incident shows that wartime hacking should be taken seriously, the ICRC said in a report Thursday. Threats can include breaches of sensitive data, disruption to critical services and disinformation campaigns to smear humanitarian groups. At B'Tselem, Yellin said the group's website remained accessible during cyberattacks in the past few weeks but took longer than usual to load because hackers overwhelmed it with traffic in a strike known as a denial-of-service attack. After experiencing a big jump in similar hacks in 2014 that brought down the organization's website, B'Tselem switched its website hosting provider to Deflect, which caters to nonprofits, he said. B'Tselem previously used an Israeli web hosting company that said it wasn't able to keep the group as a customer because the high volume of attacks was hard to handle, he said. Deflect works with many human rights groups, independent media outlets and activists in Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, Russia and other regions. Dmitri Vitaliev, founding director of eQualitie, the Montreal-based nonprofit that runs Deflect, said he started the service in 2011 to deal specifically with organizations that face frequent website hacks. "Since the Hamas incursion, our clients from this region have been pummeled nonstop," Vitaliev said, adding that none of their websites has gone down. The hosting service uses machine learning to detect techniques that hackers reuse, making it easier to defend against those because Deflect's systems quickly adapt, he said. In many of the continuing attacks against organizations in Israel and Palestine, Deflect's machine-learning tool hasn't recognized patterns, meaning hackers are frequently using new methods, he said. A major cloud infrastructure and security company, uses a network of data centers in over 100 countries around the world to defend against denial-of-service attacks. Even if denial-of-service attacks don't cause website outages, hackers intend to disrupt and use the attacks as a "Muzzling tool," said Vitaliev. When a human rights group's website is knocked offline, employees working for the organization and the people they serve are reminded that opponents want to shut them down, he said.
This Cyber News was published on www.wsj.com. Publication date: Thu, 30 Nov 2023 23:19:27 +0000