Anonymous Sudan retaliates by targeting Israel’s academic sector

Recently, a hacking group dubbed Anonymous Sudan has allegedly attacked the websites of several major universities in Israel. The threat group has temporarily shut down one of Israel’s biggest cybersecurity firms, Check Point.

The website seemingly returned to its normal operations briefly.

Before the attack on the Israeli cybersecurity company, the university websites suffered an attack from the earlier-mentioned group and became unavailable for several hours.

The confirmed compromised websites for browsing are the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University, Haifa University, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Reichman University, Weizmann Institute of Science, and the Open University of Israel.

On the other hand, a Check Point representative claimed that their sites are all operating despite the recent attack. In addition, the spokesperson explained that the company’s website has a protection solution for distributed denial-of-service attacks.

 

The Anonymous Sudan hacktivist group revealed that their recent attacks are only retaliation against Israel.

 

Based on reports, the hacktivist group Anonymous Sudan and the listed websites they attacked are part of their campaign to retaliate against Israel over what they did to Palestine in the past months.

In addition, the group revealed that the recent attacks are not their primary operation, and another one will be coming on April 7. Researchers have yet to discover if the latest campaigns have infiltrated the academic institutions’ systems.

According to a separate researcher, these hacking incidents are part of a campaign called OPIsrael. This campaign focuses on targeting the Israeli internet. Fortunately, some websites the actors have compromised have returned to normal.

The impacted cybersecurity company explained that these service-interrupting attacks have only brought down websites and not harvested data. Security providers could quickly recover compromised data from these campaigns.

However, these attackers could also transition into a more destructive attack requiring their victims to provide the ransom.

The Anonymous Sudan group has briefly compromised websites related to numerous medical centres, such as Rambam Hospital. Currently, the medical institution has rejected the allegations about the cyberattacks.