A group of Iraqi hackers has reportedly targeted the website of a number of Israeli companies involved in the information technology sector as well as electronic purchase or sale of products on online services or over the Internet.
Social media activists said various Israeli websites are currently offline due to a widespread cyber attack that took place on Tuesday and was perpetrated by an Iraqi hacker group calling itself "ALtahrea Team."
Among the affected sites are the Lifters website, the Nadlan World website, and the website of the Liam Group.
Iraqi hackers posted a picture of Iran's top anti-terror commander Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani, who was assassinated along with his Iraqi comrade Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the second-in-command of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), in a US drone strike authorized by former president Donald Trump near Baghdad International Airport on January 3, 2020.
They also placed a tab in order to play the official anthem of the Iraqi PMU, better known by the Arabic word Hashd al-Sha’abi, on the defaced Israeli websites.
Sabereen News, a Telegram news channel associated with Hashd al-Sha’abi, reported on July 11 that ALtahrea Team had managed to break into the Tel Aviv municipality website and take it down, a week after a similar cyber attack on NTA Metropolitan Mass Transit System Ltd., which is responsible for the design and construction of a mass transit system in the coastal Israeli city.
“Does not work; it's suspended by order of General Qassem Soleimani,” read the message posted on the Tel Aviv Municipality website at the time it was hacked.
Israel’s NTA Metropolitan Mass Transit System Ltd, the company building the light rail network for the Tel Aviv area, said earlier this month that its website was temporarily disrupted by a foreign cyberattack.
Sabereen News said then that a group based in the Arab country had targeted the company, affecting its operating systems, control monitors, and servers.
Back on June 28, two groups of Iraqi hackers targeted the website of Israeli digital intelligence company Cellebrite, which provides solutions for retrieving information from electronic devices and analyzing the data.
Lebanon’s Arabic-language al-Mayadeen television news network reported that Iraqi hackers were behind the cyber attack that temporarily took down the Petah Tikva-based company’s website.
The targeting apparently came in the form of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, during which a website is targeted by overwhelming its servers with too many requests to connect.