Contributor

Bank of Israel hacked

Opinion
Apr 29, 20081 min

The Bank of Israel’s website had been defaced by hacktivists.  According to a spokesman for the Bank of Israel the site was hosted by a third party and is not actually connected to internal systems.  Interesting that traceroutes indicate that the site is hosted by Bezeq, the Israeli telephone company, and that the IP address is in the Israeli governement’s netblock.   So, while it may be true that the website is not directly connected to the internal systems at the Bank of Israel it appears that an Israeli government sustained website has been taken down for almost two days.

Keep in mind that the Bank of Israel is equivalent to the US Federal Reserve. Not a place where consumers keep there money but the central bank that controls money supply. Imagine if the Fed’s website where hacked by terrorist organizations. That would be chilling.  

Richard Stiennon is chief research analyst at IT-Harvest, the firm he founded in 2005 to cover the 1,600 vendors that make up the IT security industry. He is the author of Surviving Cyberwar (Government Institutes, 2010) and There Will Be Cyberwar: How the Move to Network-Centric Warfighting Set the Stage for Cyberwar. He is a member of the advisory board at the Information Governance Initiative and principal of TrueBit Cyber Partners. He also serves on the R2-TAC, the technical advisory committee for the Responsible Recycling standard for e-waste.

Stiennon was chief marketing officer for Fortinet Inc. and vice president of threat research at Webroot Software. Prior to that, he was vice president of research at Gartner Inc. He has a B.S. in aerospace engineering and an M.A. in war in the modern world from King’s College, London.

The opinions expressed in this blog are those of Richard Stiennon and do not necessarily represent those of IDG Communications Inc. or its parent, subsidiary or affiliated companies.

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