Thursday, 26 October, 2000, 18:39 GMT 19:39 UK Israel under cyber attack

Several official Israeli web sites have crashed after falling prey to a concerted jamming campaign by Islamic groups around the world. The website of the Israeli parliament was paralysed on Thursday morning after being penetrated by hackers believed by officials to be based in Saudi Arabia.

And the foreign ministry website has been down since Wednesday after being overwhelmed by floods of incoming mail.

The Prime Minister's Office and the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) have also come under attack.

Attack call

The Associated Press reported that the cyberwar had been triggered by a group of Israeli teenagers who told a local newspaper they had managed to sabotage a website of the Lebanese guerrilla movement Hezbollah.

Ehud Barak: web site jammed An Israeli Foreign Ministry official was quoted as saying that several radical Islamic web sites retaliated by calling on users to attack Israeli sites.

Reports say the Islamic groups provided access to computer programmes which allowed users to flood sites with huge amounts of electronic mail.

Prime Minister Ehud Barak's office was the first to be affected but the site was later restored.

The IDF web site avoided collapse by switching from the local Netvision server to one connected to United States communications giant AT & T.

Hacking history

Cyber wars are not unusual in the Middle East.

An Israeli teenager who claimed to have destroyed an Iraqi government internet site was hailed as a hero last year.

The boy was feted in Israel after he sent a virus by email to the site - www.iraq.com - after reading about allegedly anti-Semitic sites in a computer magazine.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/middle_east/newsid_992000/992879.stm

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), October 26, 2000