Israeli group posts photos of not-so-Anonymous hackers

Israeli hackers attacked computers belonging to Anonymous and allied hacker groups, taking pictures with exploited webcams and posting the photos online, during the organization’s OpIsrael hacking attack last week.

A hacker called Buddhax, a member of the Israeli Elite Force hacking group, posted the information on the IEF’s Facebook page Wednesday, two days after anti-Israel hackers attempted to repeat last year’s mass attacks on Israeli sites.

Several web sites, including those belonging to the Israel Postal Company and Education Ministry, were brought down for a short period of time. Hackers belonging to Anonymous reportedly published online a list of phone numbers, emails and passwords of senior Israeli officials. Israeli officials said that the list was outdated. Some private Israeli websites were also brought down. Most of the outages were caused by distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks, which freeze a site with an overwhelming amount of traffic.

Anonymous, a loosely organized international hacker organization, vowed to replace content on websites with anti-Israel messages or disable them with DDOS attacks. The attack fell on April 7, the anniversary of last year’s attempt, when hackers threatened to “erase Israel from the Internet.”

While Anonymous hackers were attacking Israeli sites, Buddhax traced the IP addresses of some of the attackers and broke into at least 16 computers, taking screenshots, scraping computers for logins and passwords of online accounts and using their webcams to take photos of the hackers, Buddhax said. He sent a message to each hacker reading “Next time don’t take part in OpIsrael. We know who you are. We know where you are. Long live Israel!”

Buddhax posted the Facebook pages and other personal data of most of his targets. Many of the pages and accounts listed in Buddhax’s document have been blocked or taken down.

Calling OpIsrael “a big failure for Anonymous ‘hackers,’” Buddhax wrote on IEF’s Facebook page that he wanted to expose the group as being less skilled than it claims to be. He noted the fact that they could not keep him off their computers. “DDOS attacks and defacing small sites are not hacking,” he wrote. “I’m not too big of a hacker, but I’m good enough to expose you.”