The Anonymous Inoculation

In its third year of coordinating cyber attacks against Israel, the online “hacktivist” group Anonymous decided to up its rhetoric. On April 7, the group promised in a video, it would unleash “an electronic Holocaust” on the Jewish state, threatening to wipe Israel from the cyber- security map. Though Anonymous garnered plenty of media attention, the question is whether it did any lasting damage. Most analysts saw it as a childish nuisance; one pro-Israeli hacktivist even broke into an OpIsrael website and posted messages defending the Jewish state. “As long as it’s a dispersed effort [comprised of] ad-hoc teams getting together for activist causes, I don’t see that as a major threat. We should be more concerned about Russia or China, which have real cyber armies,” said Asaph Schulman, vice president of marketing at Checkmarx. “It’s not like the Chinese trying to hack Lockheed Martin for the latest IP in aerodynamics.” This article was originally featured in the Jerusalem Post. Read the rest of the article here (PDF).