In the wake - or at the start - of what hacking groups using the name Anonymous have dubbed “OpIsrael”, I want to write about my own in-depth investigations into this murky and mysterious internet event. There are many reasons why #OpIsrael has been so fascinating to me (even at the expense of my work), which I will attempt to enumerate. At the very least, what I have learned through my efforts has reinforced my belief that journalism in the age of the internet is sometimes unsound, trigger-happy, and negligent. As comics-journalist and expert Joe Sacco so often implies, interpretation of the Israel-Palestine conflict is limited by lack of information - Twitter aside. At the end of the day, there are still no clear answers and few solid sources. If “hacktivism” is going to continue to grow as a form of protest, there must be new methods of fact-checking which also emerge to provide citizens with reliable information. If the internet is deemed as untrustworthy, and yet the internet is the only means of verifying hacktivist claims, we are truly in a bind when we seek to fact-check as third-party investigators. However, when tools as basic as a web browser can show irrefutably that some official Israeli statements, as well as statements from hackers, are false and misleading, some credence must be given to the internet as a means of source verification. This is what I have been attempting to explore; to point out inconsistencies that are easily verified, to discover which information is unverifiable by nature, and why.


I vividly remember the first time I heard the word “Palestine”. While participating in the 2001 Oklahoma Model United Nations, in which high-schoolers represent countries and participate in mock UN-proceedings (I was assigned to Albania, and my team participated in diddly-squat capacity), I learned of the existence of the PLO. The kids representing the PLO were all business — they had something to say about every damned proposal being discussed and were constantly submitting their own for consideration. The moderator would remind them that they did not have the correct status to submit; they would remind the moderator that they had at least the right to speak for 2 minutes, and would proceed to rant on about those strange, supposedly oppressed and insignificant Palestinians - every ten minutes. At the time, I was fairly annoyed that a large bulk of our sessions were being hijacked by this organization that I had never even heard of. “They’re not even a real country”, I remember thinking, as I sipped diet cokes and waited for something to come up which had anything remotely to do with Albania - not much, it turned out.

More than a decade later, my impression of the Model UN PLO representatives is a perfect metaphor for media coverage of the current #OpIsrael “cyberwar”. As Oklahoma kids described human rights violations that seemed almost comical in scope (I was incredulous), I distinctly remember feeling a dull sort of shock over never having heard anything about their accusations during my many 15 years of life. This feeling of shock is shared by Sacco, who describes feeling compelled to write about Gaza and Palestine after hearing accusations of human rights violations that he had never been exposed to in the media.

“Americans really think that they’re hot shit when it comes to journalism, but all those years of so-called objective journalism have really obscured the reality. For instance, going to the Middle East myself and seeing what I saw, I thought: Why isn’t this stuff in the paper?”

What I love most about Sacco’s mammoth work, Footnotes in Gaza, is that it subtly points out how information based on anecdote and personal experience is difficult to trust or verify, how eyewitness accounts of events differ in detail and thereby compromise integrity, and how difficult it is for a journalist or even for a reasonably intelligent person to make sense of the grey area surrounding the Israel-Palestine conflict. Regardless of these implications, Sacco manages to somehow trust the first-hand accounts he obtains from residents of Gaza regarding a massacre in 1956 in the village of Rafah. Eyewitness testimony, like a Twitter feed, is often very difficult to fact-check. But sheer volume can raise suspicion, as it does in his work, and as it does in my OpIsrael research. Digging my heels into the Tweet-wars and the cyberbattle, I think: Why isn’t this stuff in the (virtual) paper?

Regarding the sheer volume of misinformation, let’s take as a first example claims about the Israeli Stock Exchange, which I am monitoring as I write this essay. A twitter account, @AnonymousHispanico, posted at 10 AM Tel Aviv time on April 8th that the TASE website was down to all users outside of Israel - laughable indeed, since I was watching the TA composite tick by on TASE at that very moment. Indeed, many news sources reporting on the “complete failure” of OpIsrael cite these types of false claims as evidence that the only power behind this event is social network storming and the spread of inaccurate information, and use completely false rumors such as the TASE claim to discredit the entire hacking attempt. Though markets did drop on April 7th, and again at noon on April 8th after hacking attempts officially resumed, it is impossible to say whether or not financial losses are related to the OpIsrael hacks. It will, however, be expensive for the many small business websites taken down in the first wave of attacks to hire developers to repair damage - and if these sites bring in income for their owners, those personal losses may not be minimal.

Having never used Twitter prior to this weekend, I was unaware of how incredibly easy (and tempting) it is to re-tweet and get excited about every rumor one hears. The Times of Israel claimed that the OpIsrael hackers intentionally posted false reports - that the stock exchange was taken down (it wasn’t), that the internet was out in Tel Aviv (it wasn’t), that certain important sites were hacked (they weren’t). Having watched the tweets come in from official organizers of the OpIsrael movement, I can definitively report that I saw no official mention whatsoever of these specific claims - they were only coming in from outside rumormongers. In fact, the @OpIsrael team had been silent for over 8 hours prior to the stock exchange claims, regrouping and resting after over 24+ solid hours of work. The majority of their posts during the initial attack were lists of sites that had been taken down - easy to verify and sticking to the point.

Besides releasing names of allegedly hacked sites, @OpIsrael also has been posting links to reported information leaks. On April 8th, around noon Tel Aviv time, @OpIsrael released what they claimed was a confidential report from Bank Hapoalim meant to be released in May 2013. I read this document carefully, and it appears to only be public information supplied by the Bank of Israel. I am not a financial expert and never will be, but none of the information in the report seemed to be very damaging to my lay-person’s eye. Information in the document is mostly dated from January and February 2013, and its opening sentence states: “The Bank of Israel’s Annual Reports are published at the end of March”, which implies that this information could have already been publicly released. Since some information is past dated, I am doubtful of the legitimacy of the claimed leak, and chalk this claim up to sensationalism. However, first quarter 2013 earnings reports are not posted on the Bank Hapoalim website yet, and the leaked document states that “Recent Economic Developments (RED) are four-monthly reviews published about a month after the end of each period”, which would be the end of April at the earliest; so perhaps this leak is indeed credible. Again, this demonstrates the murkiness of information when trying to verify the validity of leaked documents.

What about Israeli misinformation? What about how the most cited example of #OpIsrael failure is the alleged hacking of the Opisrael website by Israeli counter-hackers? Somehow, journalists from CNN to the Jerusalem Post to the AP managed to avoid the easiest of fact-checks - perhaps because they lead to inconclusive results. Israel claims to have hacked the main website for the OpIsrael attempt. The current Opisrael website, operationisrael.tk, never lost functionality and was never hacked. This website was linked to a week ago when Anonymous first declared the start date for OpIsrael on its blog. I am completely and utterly appalled that so many reputable news sources cannot perform such a basic task as verifying the purchase date for websites. The creation of opisrael.com was easily verified using WhoIs - a third party free information website that verifies creation dates and locations for any website. According to WhoIs, Opisrael.com was created on April 4th. Operationistrael.tk does not use a dot com domain name and is therefore unverifiable (at least by me), however, this purportedly legitimate website for the hacking operation was linked to on the “official” Anonymous Tumblr and Twitter pages well before any news agents reported the opisrael.com hack. Furthermore, though I am in no way involved in hacking, I do have an interest in open-source and open-web activism, and I know that no hacker in their right mind would ever, ever, ever use a dot-com domain name (let alone pay for site or information hosting). The fact that Israeli officials claimed to hack opisrael.com is not surprising to me. What IS surprising is the readiness with which global news media accepted this story. If I am one lone woman, sitting at home watching a Twitter feed, and I can search for this this information, why can’t such reputable sources such as CNN and the AP?

Jerusalem Post writer Andre Oboler has responded to counter-claims that the original opisrael.com site is a fake, citing wsdata.com and saying that the website was indeed created on March 17th and linked to in one cyber-news bulletin as the official announced OpIsrael site.

“The opisrael.com hack appears to have replaced the DNS record with one that is just 2 days old. The original information is, however, still archived. Before the hack the domain information was last modified on March 17th and the server resided in Switzerland. While originally seeking to down play the hack, OpIsrael activists are now pretending the site was never part of their campaign and was instead an Israeli front.”

These claims, however, do not explain why the site was moved on April 4th (prior to the hack), or why hackers would use a dot-com site. Hacking does not tend to replace DNS records - and why would Israeli hackers move the DNS records themselves, if this action only discredits their claims? The official OpIsrael twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr groups have not linked to OpIsrael.com, or at least they did not when I started following their cyberwar on April 6th - prior to when the site was allegedly hacked.

There are also several inconsistencies with supposedly leaked data from credit card companies and banks. One list of credit cards I found did indeed have thousands of names leaked, but the addresses for the hacked accounts were all based in the US, not Israel. A group claiming to have hacked into Decell Inc GPS coordinates for sensitive Israeli sites posted a thousand Israeli coordinates, but they were encrypted, so there was no way to check their validity (I tried to verify Decell ownership myself and its business undertakings in Israel - but their website was down, leading me to believe that the site is either hacked or has been taken down by the company to avoid further hacking attempts - which implies that the Decell leaks were actually somewhat valid). Regarding the information leaks, various folk were tweeting that they personally had had their email or Facebook accounts hacked via dumped email lists, or that they had used leaked credit cards to illegally purchase iPhones and Rolexes. On the one hand, this somewhat attests to the validity of some of the leaks, on the other hand, anyone can make a Twitter account and claim that their Facebook has been hacked or that they’ve bought something. For me personally, one indication that some of the leaked information has actually been real is the fact that some of it has been mysteriously deleted, only a few hours after being posted. @OpIsrael claims, of course, that the Israeli government is behind these deletions. Most dumped information has been posted online using PasteBucket, a free website that lets you post text on the internet. Usually this website is used for people to post open-source computer code. There is no reason why these dumps would be deleted so quickly- unless PasteBucket itself is getting involved to remove these illegal hacks. This seems to be the more obvious explanation to me, and it indeed makes sense for a third-party website to attempt to keep their content within the confines of the law.

I would, after all, be committing a felony if I myself tried to verify leaked bank account information in the most obvious way - by attempting to log into bank websites using the supposedly leaked user IDs and passwords. This really wouldn’t be very difficult and I could probably do it quickly using a ghost or remote VPN, a traceless browser such as TOR, and a lot of courage. Committing a crime in the pursuit of good journalism has probably been done countless times over, but it doesn’t seem like an intelligent move for one single non-journalist lady (me) to be making.

Which brings me to an important point - how can any journalist or activist or layperson seeking to verify leaked information do so at all without committing a crime?  In this new and burgeoning world of “cyber-warfare” and “hacktivism”, some traditional methods of source verification are impossible to utilize unless one commits a felony. While I am reasonably certain that affected banks and other institutions are verifying supposedly leaked information: “credit card companies follow up on these numbers and cancel the cards for customers whose numbers appear in public” (TimesofIsrael.com), private citizens are unable to do so without breaking the law. It is a case of hearsay to the absolute extreme - claims of legal breaches with no means of verification unless one commits a legal breach oneself. This could create a very dangerous and difficult future for journalists: if this sort of hacktivism becomes more mainstream and it thereby becomes increasingly important to verify information, there must be a legal means to do so as an unbiased third party.

This led to my next, and perhaps more dangerous/dubious step — to manually check functionality of important websites that OpIsrael was claiming to have hacked. Let’s examine some of the glaring discrepancies I was able to find. I have already mentioned the opisrael.com debacle, unchecked by journalists and cited as reasons for Anonymous’ “failures”. As pointed out by The Times of Israel, some claims by OpIsrael supporters that police.gov.il were hacked were in fact using broken or incorrect links - replacing the “.il” with “.li”. As Goldschlager states, “whatever it was they thought they were hacking, it wasn’t the Israel Police site”. At some point, links to “president.gov.il” were indeed non-functioning - but they were missing “www” at their start. Once “www” had been added, the president’s website loaded in my browser just fine. Other claims by hackers to have brought down the Ministry of Defense website, which they claimed was defence.gov.il, not only contained a spelling error, but in actuality the real Ministry of Defense site, mod.gov.il, remained fully functional - that is, until this error was pointed out in various tweets. A few hours later, mod.gov.il was indeed tango down in my browser around 5 PM EST on April 8th.

In an article published on The Daily Beast, Eli Lake interviewed a team of Israeli “counter hackers” and described their attempts to strike back at Anonymous OpIsrael affiliated groups. There is major misinformation contained in statements by Israeli hackers when they say

“Most Israeli hackers acknowledged the fact that the Arab hackers are… well not smart,” [SIC]

Besides being tinged with an air of racism, this comment fails to take into account that hacking groups have been posting on Twitter based out of many non-Arab nations, including Brazil, Italy, and Uruguay. Some of the more “interesting” and potentially serious (if legitimate) leaks have come from groups based in Argentina. The claims that these hacks are only being carried out by Arab hackers (and by Western implication, terrorist hackers) are completely untrue - unless Arab groups are fluent in Spanish and lying about their locations by posing as South Americans or Europeans. This is indeed a worldwide hacking attempt. Furthermore, Mr. Lake’s article, which is riddled with typos, hails the Israeli counter-hackers as more successful than the OpIsrael hackers. As an argument, he describes their methods: bringing down Hezbollah websites using Ddos attacks and leaking the name of one single OpIsrael leader based in the US. These supposedly successful hacks, claimed to be superior to those of the “not smart Arabs”, use the exact same tools being utilized by OpIsrael hackers around the world - in effect, claiming that the actions of Israeli hackers are somehow more legitimate even though they are using the same methods.

Lastly, Lake describes an interview with the director of a security systems analyst for the firm Radware in which he states:

“As of Monday, no major sites were shut down or defaced […] Though OpIsrael claimes [SIC] to have done damage to more than 100 websites in Israel, including the press office for the Israel Defense Forces, Kenig says he has seen no evidence of that”.

At the time of this writing, idf.il is indeed functioning - at 3AM on April 7th, however, I was personally unable to connect to this website, implying that it was down at some point. Interviewing professionals involved in security analysis seems like great journalism practice to me - as long as those analysts are not themselves enmeshed in the situation. Perhaps if Mr. Lake had interviewed a systems analyst based out of Europe or the States (or really, any third-party local besides the country in which the event is taking place), I wouldn’t be suspicious of credibility. Perhaps if Mr. Lake had, like I did (for what seems like 24 hours straight), checked the functionality of government websites reportedly hacked (and tried to verify that these sites were indeed the correct government sites prior to April 7), I could take his article more seriously. The fact that this type of journalism is allowed to be published on such a reputable website as The Daily Beast is troubling.

I have demonstrated that the OpIsrael hackers and affiliated groups have also supplied false information and made ridiculous claims as far as information breached, so please make no assumptions that I am approaching this event with information bias. However, as previously noted, none of the Anonymous claims I was able to quickly verify as false were made by the official OpIsrael team  - only by other Anonymous twitter accounts. Nearly every hack, defacement, and tango down that was posted by @OpIsrael was, in some respect, legitimate, even though many websites reported as down were fully functional on my end when I checked them. As of 10 PM EST on April 7th, I had re-checked functionality of every government website that was listed on the official OpIsrael information page as hacked - and 43% of them were still non-functioning. 43%. This was more than 24 hours after OpIsrael began  - and more than 18 hours after Israeli officials released statements that all non-functioning government websites had been repaired after only being down for a few hours. Why, in that case, were sites that I personally was trying to access still not functioning? Why didn’t reputable journalists do something as simple as verify the pre-existence of these websites and load up a web browser to check their functionality? Why, as of 3 AM EST on April 7, were 60% of non-government websites (such as the Israeli site for Coca-Cola) reported as down or hacked indeed down or hacked, on my end? Granted, I was only able to personally check about 600 websites, which is a small fraction of the purported 100,000 Anonymous claims to have hacked. Mainstream media puts the number at around 1000, and I found 487 down, with my tiny probe. I hardly think that my minimal findings of 487 downed websites accounts for nearly 50% of all websites affected by OpIsrael. Again, this is journalism gone haywire.

What about statements from officials at the Israeli Finance Ministry, which state that “The Foreign Ministry’s website was taken down for a few seconds, but no other ministries behind the government firewall were affected” (Times of Israel)? Are the dozens of government sites that I personally have been able to verify as down simply not behind a firewall? Perhaps the affected sites do not contain vital information, and perhaps Anonymous is not truly seeking to cause “damage” beyond making a large percentage of sites unavailable. Former director of Israel’s Cyber Buereau, Issac Ben-Israel, has stated that “Anonymous doesn’t have the skills to damage the country’s vital infrastructure. And if that was its intention, then it wouldn’t have announced the attack ahead of time.”. @OpIsrael has responded on its twitter page in retaliation to these claims, saying

“Anonymous doesn’t do that. Actually harming infrastructure is something morally corrupt organizations & governments do. We leave that to morally corrupt governments”.

Whether this is truly a matter of ideology or simply that Anonymous lacks technological ability to damage infrastructure will never be known. As Nir Goldshlager, an Israeli “white-hat” hacker states, “It’s a good thing the hackers post [credit card] numbers …Imagine if they would use them.” (Times of Israel).  Indeed, if Anonymous was more malicious in intent, it could have easily coded scripts that would use leaked credit card information to make mass purchases. What is certain is that downplaying the abilities of hackers to cause serious damage is questionable, considering that in

“In January 2012, a hacker network that claimed to be based in Saudi Arabia paralyzed the websites of Israel’s stock exchange and national airline” (CNN.com).

What is also certain is that Israeli businesses were urged to take their websites down or “shore up passwords” in preparation for the attack, and a hotline was set up for victims of hacking. Israeli university experts have indeed admitted that “this is a real battle” (CBS). So why such a dearth of media coverage?

As a final note, I would like to update you with the current status of claimed government site hacks. It is 10:00 PM EST on my end. Out of 72 .gov websites listed on the official Anonymous OpIsrael blog list of hacked sites, 52 are working. Which means that 27% of affected .gov websites are still down, more than 48 hours after hacking began. Some of the sites that are now fully functional were not loading in my browser as of my initial checks at 2 AM April 7th, which leads me to conclude that most of these links are indeed to legitimate Israeli government sites. Why would Anonymous have posted claims to fake sites if the major ones from the list, such as Education.gov.il and Mossad.gov.il are now fully functional? Some of the functioning sites seem to just re-direct me to other functioning sites on the list - which is inconclusive. And sometime during the past 5 hours, the Ministy of Defense site (mod.gov.il) has become operational. However, 27% does not seem like a negligible number - even to non-statisticians. @OpIsrael and @Anonymous have tweeted that Israel should “expect more surprises” in the days to come. The battle is ongoing, and therefore cannot be claimed to be a “failure”. No conflict is ever complete after the first 24 hours.

After numerous postings to Facebook about the OpIsrael attempt and my findings, my best pal called me up. “So, you’re anti-Zionist now!”, he said. One must proceed very cautiously in the face of this sort of terminology. I replied, “I would prefer to be called ‘Pro-Palestine’. I believe that Israel has a right to exist and I believe that Palestine has a right to exist. I’ve been reading about this conflict for much of my adult life and I’m tired of hiding my true feelings for fear of being labeled anti-Semitic. I’m tired of what I believe are credible sources, the UN for example, documenting human rights violations. And if anything, my research into OpIsrael has made me even more incredulous about the accuracy of mainstream reporting regarding internet activism”. My friend paused, and said “Yeah, you’re probably right. The media sure hates Anonymous”.

Much like the Model UN PLO group from my youth, the ongoing OpIsrael hacking project could be initially perceived as “annoying” at best - as it is described by Israeli news outlets. However, this type of activism has brought an awareness of a political situation to millions as it has exploded across social media. Information advocates are describing DdoS attacks as a new type of legitimate protest, akin to flooding a Senator’s office with paper mailings requesting a specific action. The PLO kids couldn’t really get anything done in our mock general council proceedings - but they certainly took up a huge about of air time. The sheer volume of their “failed” voices did ensure one thing: that I would never forget what they tried to do.

And hey, I’m making a case for legitimacy based on unverifiable claims, too - you’ll just have to trust that I am accurately reporting the status of affected websites and that I checked that the websites are indeed valid. You’ll just have to trust that my version of Firefox is working correctly. I will just be one more voice in the clamor of hearsay that makes this whole mess impossible to unravel. Internet information will always be difficult to unravel unless journalists can obtain new safe and legal methods of verifying information. But I trust my own research, and I can rest easy knowing that I personally made attempts  - unlike the AP.