Operations of over a thousand websites or even more could have been disrupted in Israel due to a coordinated cyberattack launched by Iranian hackers on Thursday morning. And the highlight of this attack was that the home page of most of these websites was replaced with the following messages posted in English and the Hebrew language.
“The countdown of Israel destruction has begun long ago and been ready for a big surprise”. Accompanied by the message are some images which are very disturbing as they are showing a destroyed Tel Aviv city and leading to some distressing YouTube videos.
Security analysts say that this is just a starting phase of a tragic cyber-warfare taking place between Israel and Iran and more disasters are yet to come. And some analysts also claim that some of the links posted in the images on the affected websites are asking the victims to switch on their webcams which could spell more trouble.
The Israel National Cyber Bureau has confirmed that a host of web portals from Israel which includes some related to the government were hacked in the morning hours of Thursday. And most of those affected were the ones hosted in Upress where hackers could have exploited a weakness in the WordPress add-on to hack.
Note- In April 2020, Iran hacked the water utility network of Israel and the latter reciprocated the attack by launching a cyberattack on Iran’s Shahid Rajaee Port halting a lot of operations on water and roadways. Now, this seems to be a second attack launched by Iran on Israel and surely will have to be prepared for a retaliation from the latter soon.
