Attacks against Israeli services continue

Cyber attacks against Israel continued this week with the internet sites of its stock exchange and national airline El Al both hit yesterday.

According to nydailynews.com, neither website contains sensitive information and neither services nor trading were affected.

El Al Israel Airlines took down its website after the attack and said in an announcement that it was taking safety features to offer protection to it and that disruptions at the site were to be expected.

Orna Goren, a spokeswoman for the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, said its site was overwhelmed by electronic requests that slowed it down dramatically, but it surely was still operating.

Last week, the Bank of Israel's Banking Supervision Department confirmed that the info from around 15,000 active accounts were exposed, with around 11,000 mastercard numbers published online two days later. Israeli deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon said such cyber attacks are "a breach of sovereignty equivalent to a terrorist operation, and needs to be treated as such".

The San Francisco Chronicle said that the hacker 'oxOmar', who claimed responsibility for posting the main points of the 20,000 Israeli mastercards, sent a warning to Israel's Ynet news outlet that a set of professional-Palestinian cyber attackers called Nightmare planned to bring down the positioning. On the time of writing, the location remains online.

An Israeli hacker, identifying himself as a soldier in an Israeli intelligence unit, retaliated by posting information online about hundreds of Saudis, Egyptians, Syrians and others.