Israeli government sites down after Anonymous threat
Israeli official cites system error, not hackers, as the source of the problem Sunday.
Israeli government sites were down yesterday following a threat from online activist collective Anonymous over Israel's interception of a flotilla bound for Gaza. However, an Israeli official said the outage was a system malfunction.
In a YouTube video posted on Friday, Anonymous threatened to "strike back" if Israel continued to block humanitarian boats trying to reach Gaza. Earlier that day, the Israeli Navy boarded a Canadian and Irish ship headed toward Gaza and made arrests.
"Your actions are illegal, against democracy, human rights, international, and maritime laws," the Anonymous video says. "Justifying war, murder, illegal interception, and pirate-like activities under an illegal cover of defense will not go unnoticed by us or the people of the world."
Two days later, the Web sites of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), the Mossad and the Shin Bet security services, as well as other government sites were down temporarily on Sunday.
An IDF spokeswoman said the incident was caused by a "server error," according to The Jerusalem Post.
This weekend was expected to be a big one for Anonymous activities, but a threatened attack on Fox News failed to happen, an attack against a Mexican drug cartel was officially canceled, and Anonymous members claimed that a threat to take down Facebook was not real.
However, the hackers aren't resting. They launched a new threat. This one aiming to disrupt the 2012 Iowa caucuses.