Israeli deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon. (Photo: Al Jazeera)
Al Akhbar English today interviewed the elusive Saudi hacker first known for releasing Israeli credit card information, now notorious for causing a frenzy with Israel’s deputy foreign minister. Politics seem like a footnote, as each step of the way, 0xOmar goads Danny Ayalon, the official, in a game of cat and mouse. Ayalon recently called the hacker a “terrorist.” 0xOmar writes to the Lebanese newspaper:
Danny Ayalon proved his stupidity multiple times. He just talks, ‘We’ll catch, We’ll do, We’ll reply, We We We We’ll.’ Enough said Danny, enough said. You say and I do, You talk and I hack, this is the reality. Wake up, you cannot even find me, I keep publishing and when you talked again, Gaza hackers taught you a lesson, hacked your Homepage and put a shoe on your face. We don’t have anything to say about people who just talk, we act!
In addition to the disclosed credit card information, 0xOmar also lets on that he’s hacked much more, stating he has “sensitive and hidden information … extracted from Israeli servers,” including, “government emails, Jammer and Surveillance device makers data.” The hacker said that he is sitting on the information, waiting for a “good time and a good place to publish.”
However web-savvy 0xOmar may be, I couldn’t help but imagine him as a teenager. In my mind, he is nabbing financial data from a laptop in his bedroom, in between bites from a mid-afternoon snack made by his mother. I see him striking a keyboard on a cluttered desk piled with unfinished homework and DVDs watched more times than birthdays celebrated.
Perhaps I envision this because 0xOmar’s responses to Al Akhbar indicate a juvenile need for approval. Without prompting, he tells the interviewer about how proud his parents are of him. And, there are other flickers of naïve youthfulness. For example, when the newspaper asks if he is “afraid about being caught?” 0xOmar is emblematic of teenager grade confidence:
NEVER! I don’t think about it even for a minute. How can I say to the world that I’m 100% sure that no one can find me? It’s simply impossible!
The hacker’s digital show down is spreading, as last week Palestinian hackers stomped a shoe on the face of the deputy foreign minister.
In his last public message to Ayalon, posted by the Saudi hacking collective Group XP, 0xOmar goes on to aggrandize virtual resistance:
From here, I challenge the world to find me, let’s the game begin. You have 2 weeks. If I come back and post another message after 2 weeks, simply you failed and I won the game.
The hacker is playful, but Ayalon is serious, serious, serious. Read the full interview with Al Akhbar here.
Gee, I thought Arabs were just “Arabs and other animals” as Erica Jong told us gayly in her book and articles published in hate-free, minority-protecting America, not so long ago. How they can possibly outhack Israeli Jews?
Allison,
What you describe is actually characteristic of hackers and has nothing to do with age, real or imagined.
And I would have thought that comments posted on Mondoweiss by many who claim to be grown men, yet sound like teens, would have served as an example of the juvenile statements many adults often make.
I don’t approve of hacking, but your swipe at the Saudi hacker seems peculiar — to put it mildly — and a deviation from your usual standards.
avi is right, allison. i am a middle-aged man and i often post juvenile comments on this site. moreover, if this is in reality a state-organized attack, i’m sure that the geniuses in psyops intel group __________ could have worked up some psychological profile for the ‘lone nut’s’ comments to muddy things even more.
More power to us, Palestinians and Arabs, to do more hacking. If Mossad, CIA, MI6, and others conspire to hack Iranian and Arab sites, we can too. Game on!
Allision, your description of teenager hackers describes the best hackers in the world and more dangerous because they are kids.
Ayalon is no match and the thing about cyber warfare is that expertise is worldwide and not something Israelis have a monopoly on. What puts Israel at a disavantage in cyber warfare is because they are so disliked that a lot of hackers around the world can be brought against them.
*Canadian teenager, 15 year old Mike Calce known as Mafiaboy hacked NASA brought down yahoo and CNN.com. got arrested, let go under Canadian law, reformed and then started again in 2007 and stole millions from Canadian and U.S. banks in a hacking scheme.
*The teenage Warelords successfully infiltrated The White House, Southwestern Bell “Ma Bell” Mainframe Systems, and large corporate providers of voice mail systems.
*The teenage 414s break into 60 computer systems at institutions ranging from the Los Alamos Laboratories to Manhattan’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
*1994 Russian crackers siphon $10 million from Citibank and transfer the money to bank accounts around the world.
*1997 A 15-year-old Croatian youth penetrates computers at a U.S. Air Force base in Guam
*Aaron Caffrey 19, was accused of almost destroying of North America’s biggest ports, the Port of Houston in Texas, by hacking into its computer systems. Computers at the port were hit with a DoS (denial of service) attack on Sept. 20, 2001, which crashed systems at the port that contained data for helping ships navigate the harbor.
*In 2000, a 16-year-old from Miami known on the Internet as “c0mrade” became the first juvenile to go to jail on federal computer-crime charges for hacking into NASA. The boy admitted to attacking a military computer network used by the DTRA (Defense Threat Reduction Agency) from Aug. 23, 1999 to Oct. 27, 1999. The youth installed a backdoor access on a server that intercepted more than 3,300 electronic messages to and from DTRA staff. The backdoor also accessed at least 19 usernames and passwords of DTRA employees, including at least 10 usernames and passwords on military computers. The unnamed juvenile was sentenced to six months in a detention facility.
*Computers at the Pentagon were targeted in an attack called “Solar Sunrise” during a tense time in the Persian Gulf in 1998. The attack led to the establishment of round-the-clock, online guards at major military computer sites. At the time, U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre called the attack “the most organized and systematic attack” on U.S. military systems.
While officials initially pointed fingers at two American teens, 19-year-old Israeli hacker Ehud Tenenbaum, who was called “The Analyzer,” was identified as their leader and arrested
*Two teens touched off one of the biggest ever international computer crime investigations in the U.S. when, for several weeks in 1994, they attacked the Pentagon’s computer network and tried to get access to a nuclear facility somewhere in Korea. The cyberculprits were identified as 16-year-old music student Richard Pryce (known as “Datastream Cowboy”) and Matthew Bevan
*Sep 1, 1999 – A Wisconsin teenager is arrested and charged for allegedly hacking into a Pentagon computer in June and illegally accessing a U.S. Army …