It's been a week since Israel and Hamas reached a ceasefire pausing their war in Gaza. But on the internet, a different kind of fighting never stopped — and has actually intensified since the rockets stopped falling and the warplanes returned to their bases.
About two hours before last week's ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, supporters of both sides intensified their barrage of distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks against each other, according to CloudFlare, a U.S. company that provides DDOS protection services to websites that come under attack. The volume of attacks continuing after the ceasefire has outpaced those occurring during the offline hostilities.
CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince doesn't know who is behind the attacks, but he says that 10 "fairly high-profile" sites representing both sides of the conflict have been hit, and have now become CloudFlare customers.
The attacks may not harm anybody, but the fact that they've outlasted a formal ceasefire stresses the idea of what constitutes the end of hostilities online. If Israel or Hamas is actually behind any of the DDOS attacks, they may be seeing what damage (or even just inconvenience) they inflict on their adversary without incurring a reprisal. And if they're performed by partisans of either side of the conflict — as with Anonymous' ongoing #OpIsrael campaign — then they show how amateurs can piggyback online to a major conflict. That was actually the case in the wake of Israel's last war with Gaza, when Israeli students wrote a program to overwhelm pro-Hamas websites.
CloudFlare doesn't want to talk about who exactly its customers are, but they include the Israeli Defense Forces website and, controversially, one belonging to Hamas' al-Qassam paramilitary wing.
As the cyber conflict broke out, CloudFlare was able to take it all in, watching both sides take out pro-Israeli and Palestinian websites in a kind of rampaging slugfest of site outages. "We were sitting there watching this from a very strange vantage point," says Prince. "Often you see these attacks and they're very one-sided. One side launches an attack to silence the other side and there's not much response. In this case there were attacks going in both directions."
The attacks have been fairly strong, typically in the 10-gigabits-per-second range, targeting web programs such as Apache. The extra traffic connects to the web server so many times that it can't work properly for legitimate visitors. This type of DDOS, known as a Layer 7 attack, needs much less bandwidth to take down a site than other forms of DDOS. In a blog post, Prince wrote the attacks have run pretty much nonstop since the ceasefire was declared.
As is usually the case with these type of online attacks, it's hard to figure out who's responsible for the hacking. CloudFlare says that it has seen some DDOS traffic come from infected botnet networks of computers in China, but Prince has no idea who is controlling them. "We haven't done any work on who the attribution is behind the attacks," Prince says. "We're must more concerned with stopping the attacks."
In the past, politically motivated DDOS attacks during conflicts, like those in Georgia and Estonia over the last decade, came from vigilante groups — some with weak or even no clear ties to the parties involved in the dispute. That may be the case here too, at least for some of the attacks. Starting a few days before the ceasefire, Anonymous launched an effort to DDOS and deface websites associated with Israel. Since then, the Anonymous News site has itself come under attack, Prince says.
Without knowing the identities of the attackers, it's impossible to know their intent. But it's perhaps worth noting that the eight-day Gaza war has been notably inconclusive, to the point where partisans of both sides are struggling to figure out who won. Israel showed off its newfound prowess at stopping Hamas' rocket and missile attacks, but Hamas claims that Israel has subtly eased its maritime blockade. And both Israel and Hamas have launched information operations on each other throughout the conflict, tweeting taunts and boasting of their tactical successes on social media. No matter who's actually responsible, defacing each side's websites is entirely commensurate with a war that emphasized spinning the public.
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