Anonymous Shows How to Hack Into Israeli Power Stations

12 January 2012 | 12:41 PM ET | Matt Liebowitz, SecurityNewsDaily Staff Writer

The Reading Power Station near Tel Aviv, Israel.
CREDIT: Avishai Teicher/PikiWiki/Creative Commons

Anonymous has posted what appear to be login details for Israeli SCADA industrial-control systems, a cyberattack that marks the politically minded group's entrance into the heated battle between Israeli and Saudi Arabian hackers that has already exposed thousands of credit card number and personal details.

A new Twitter account, @FuryOfAnon, posted a message yesterday (Jan. 11) that said, "Who wanna have some fun with israeli scada systems." Included in the taunt was a Pastebin link showing what purport to be 10 IP addresses and logins for Israeli supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems.

Industrial-control facilities, including nuclear power and water treatment plants, use SCADA software to control and automate machinery. The infamous Stuxnet worm hijacked the SCADA system at an Iranian nuclear-fuel processing plant in July 2010. Since then, the governments of many nations have been on the lookout for signs of future attacks.

FuryOfAnon's leak comes one day after an Israeli hacker calling himself Omer Cohen, (hacker name "0xOmer"), posted the names, credit card numbers, phone numbers and email addresses of more than 400 Saudi Arabians. This attack was a retaliatory strike against a Saudi hacker, "0xOmar," who on Jan. 3 stole and posted the credit card numbers, names, addresses, phone numbers and government ID numbers of roughly 15,000 Israelis.

Anonymous had stayed out of this tit-for-tat hacker spat; the group's endorsement of 0xOmar's campaign (and that of his Saudi hacking collective known as Group-XP), places powerful allies in 0xOmar's corner. Anonymous' support was announced by Sabu, an outspoken member who in the past has been decidedly anti-Israel.

With Anonymous' backing, 0xOmar now has researchers and other sleuths looking to unmask him. An Israeli student, Amir Phadida, told the Israeli tabloid Ynet that, through a pro-Palestinian forum, he found the hacker's email address and Facebook profile, which identified 0xOmar as Omar Habib a 19-year-old computer science student and café employee in Pachuca, Mexico.

0xOmar refuted Phadida's claims and said nobody can find him. "I saw some stupids said they've found me, one in Mexico, one in Riyadh, one in Dubai, look, let me explain my method, as I know no one can find me," 0xOmar wrote.

His method, he said, is that he's hijacked computers around the world, which he uses to hide himself and through which he conducts his attacks.

"I use a really complicated hand-made method for hiding myself, so if you reach to Dubai, Mexico, Riyadh, Minsk, Helsinki, New York, Tel-Aviv, Haifa, Tokyo, Moscow, etc., excellent! You found one of my poor victims."

In a final message, 0xOmar invited "all Arab-Muslim hackers to unite against Israel and join this war."

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