Innumerable Israeli websites compromised in ransomware assault

A massive 1m Israeli websites were hacked during Saturday-Sunday past week. The websites prominently were those of well-known telecom companies and banks. The hackers had tried implanting ransomware onto more than 1m web-pages of the country, blocking visitors from accessing them till they agreed to pay certain specified ransom. Although security professionals thwarted an attempt towards deactivation of Israel's Internet, the hackers still managed defacing a large number of web-pages on which they posted "Jerusalem is the capital of Palestine."

Cyber-security specialists from Israel report that the hackers made use of Nagich a widget for mechanically implanting malware onto the compromised websites. Nagich is a Hebrew website that greatly functions for increasing the accessibility of the Internet for disabled Internauts thereby contaminating the websites that utilize Nagich's services. The hackers targeted this site. However, in 20 minutes of being alerted about the assault on it, Nagich terminated the hack. Whilst destruction owing to the assault seemed minimal, security personnel observed that more than 1m web-pages of Nagich clients were potentially prone to be affected.

Further, Verizon Media's senior software developer Ran Bar-Zik, who analyzed the assault and jointly with hacker Yuval Adam, said there was astonishing negligence towards the assault, although alerts had been issued during recent past. He accused Nagich as well as its clients that felt the brunt of the assault of failing towards adopting fundamental measures for safeguarding from the kind of assault. According to him, the hackers rather than create vandalism could've caused destruction worth billions. The defacing too stayed for merely a short time, fortunately due to the alertness of cyber directorate as also of Verizon Media along with other researchers perhaps who too raised alarm about the problem, Bar-Zik enumerated. www.israelnationalnews.com posted this, March 4, 2019.

Adam explains the assault's actual objective was making numerous Israelis to pull down ransom software so the hackers could restrict the end-users from accessing unsecured pages and files till of course they made a ransom payment for unlocking their PCs. According to a warning by him, in case the assault succeeded there could've been an overwhelming effect to the Israeli economy.

» SPAMfighter News - 3/8/2019