Israel-Palestine tussle could spill over to cyberspace

The ongoing conflict in West Asia could well spill over to the cyber space, and India may be a target for hacktivists from across the border, according to cybersecurity and intelligence provider CloudSEK.

“Our contextual artificial intelligence digital risk platform XVigil has discovered multiple hacktivist groups planning cyber attacks on India due to their extended support towards Israel amid war-torn situations in West Asia,” said a CloudSEK report.

It cautioned that the cyber attacks on India are to be conducted under their hacktivist campaign, #OpsIsrael #OpIsraelV2. “The motivations behind these attacks primarily revolve around political factors, most of which are retaliatory actions in the ongoing hacktivist warfare between countries,” it said.

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The attack vector for the campaign will likely be mass defacement, data breaches, credential leaks, & DDoS (distributed denial of services) attacks. “Multiple threat actor groups were involved in the attacks which stood supportive towards Palestine,” it pointed out.

It said it found messages in the dark web that indicated likely attacks on the Indian cyberspace.

The DDoS attacks are aimed at making popular, official and useful websites unavailable to genuine users, disrupting services for several minutes.

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“The attacker tricks multiple computers or servers into sending a huge amount of data to a target. This flood of data overwhelms the target’s network, causing it to slow down or crash, making it difficult for legitimate users to access the target’s website or services,” said the CloudSEK report.

The other forms of attacks could include accounts takeovers and leaking sensitive information. 

How to be safe

In order to defend the networks, the company wanted organisations to deploy load balancers to distribute traffic and configure firewalls and routers to filter and block traffic. It also asked organisations to implement bot-detection technologies and algorithms to identify large-scale Web requests from botnets employed by the threat actors to launch DDoS attacks.

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