According to Mashour Abou Daqqa of the Palestinian Authority, the disruptions – which appear to have originated from IP addresses in China, Germany and Slovenia – started on Tuesday morning, although Daqqa has not revealed any specific information on the outages.
Security forum sources suggest that the outages appear to be a direct attack on the servers controlling the Palestinian telecoms systems, although the motive behind the attacks is unclear. Daqqa meanwhile, has blamed Israel for the attacks in TV interviews he has given.
The Hacker News (THN) says that the network hack could be inked to rising regional tensions over the Palestinian Authority's successful move to acquire membership in Unesco on Monday.
“It also comes against the backdrop of new cross-border clashes along the border between Israel and Gaza. One Israeli civilian and at least 10 Palestinian militants were killed in the worst violence on that front in months. The fighting followed the launch of rocket salvos against Israeli territory last week. Israel retaliated with airstrikes”, says the newswire.
The Softpedia newswire, meanwhile, says this is not the first time when the battle between Palestine and Israel has escalated to a virtual environment “as hackers take such opportunities as major victories against the people they consider being the enemy.”
“Not long ago, it was the other way around, when Israeli web hosting servers were taken down by a couple of hackers who claimed they were doing it for the freedom of Palestine. At the time the attack targeted a large number of websites which were defaced, but it was nothing so serious as in this case”, notes the newswire..
“On one hand, virtual wars would be a much better solution than physical battles in which a lot of innocent people are killed and lives are ruined.”