Hackers immobilize website of Israel's largest hospital

Jan 25, 2012, 10:21 GMT

Tel Aviv - Unknown hackers targeted the website of Israel's largest hospital Wednesday, with a denial of service attack putting it out of action for hours.

The attack seemed to be the latest move in a cyber war between pro-Palestinians and pro-Israelis.

Israeli media reported that some hours after midnight the security systems of the website of Sheba hospital, outside Tel Aviv, identified one million simultaneous attempts to enter the site, causing an overload on the server and putting it out of action.

Technicians were attempting to identify the source of the cyber attacks.

The cyber war kicked off in early January, when a hacker calling himself 'OxOmar' published online the credit card details of thousands of Israelis, after breaking into what he said were more than 80 Israeli servers.

He said he was then joined by a group calling itself Nightmare, and went on to paralyze several Israeli websites, including that of the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and Israel's El-Al International Airlines.

Pro-Israel hackers, for their part, published the log-in details of 20,000 Arab Facebook users, and said they had taken down websites in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.