Israeli Deputy PM online accounts hacked in latest cyberwar act

Major social networking accounts belonging to Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Silvan Shalom were hacked on Wednesday by ZcompanyHackingCrew, in the latest act of cyberwar against Israel.

Shalom’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube accounts were filled with pro-Palestinge posts and updates. The group said it hacked his email, extracting personal mail, contacts and documents which it plans to dessiminate to the public.

One Twitter message the group posted stated the Gaza conflict was an “unjust war and occupation,” adding “Who can bare to see the horror, the deaths of children and innocent people, trying to protect their occupied land?”

ZCompanyHackingCrew insisted that it was operating independently of Anonymous or the Islamist Hamas movement that runs Gaza.

"We are not hamas we are not anonymous," the group tweeted.

The cyber attack follows Anonymous hacker group’s leak of personal information belonging to 5,000 Israeli officials.

Anonymous hacked more than 700 Israeli websites, such as the Israeli Defense Ministry and President Benjamin Netanyahu’s official website, with the majority of the sites still inactive.

Over the past few days, Israel has “deflected 44 million cyber-attacks on government websites,” Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz told AP.

Anonymous used their anonpaste.me site to post a message to the Israeli government, and linked the post to a page with the names, ID numbers and personal emails of the 5,000 officials.

The message said: "It has come to our attention that the Israeli government has ignored repeated warnings about the abuse of human rights, shutting down the internet in Israel and mistreating its own citizens and those of its neighboring countries."

The group added "Israeli Gov. this is/will turn into a cyberwar."