Iran-linked hackers claim to have infiltrated IDF, Saudi databases

An Iran-linked hacker group calling itself the Islamic Cyber Resistance claims it infiltrated the servers of the Israel Defense Forces earlier this week and extracted the personal details of top army officers.

The group posted the information, which it says includes job titles, passwords, postal and email addresses, phone numbers and military codes of more than 2,000 Israeli officers onto its website.

The list also included around 200 names and public and home phone numbers of senior Defense Ministry officials, as well as of employees of defense contractors and industries, yet some of the numbers were outdated.

It said that it carried out the cyber attack to avenge the December 4 assassination of a Hezbollah leader, Hassan Laqiss, an operation that the Lebanon-based militant group blamed on Israel.

The hacker collective appears to have branches in Algeria and Saudi Arabia, as well as Iran. The group also said that it had hacked into the servers of the Saudi army and stole information pertaining to 1,000 Saudi officers. All told, it claims to have stolen about 5,000 classified documents.

The Iranian Fars news agency was the first major outlet to report on the incident, on December 16, publishing an excel document containing the files taken by the collective.

Iran and Israel have accused one another repeatedly of carrying out cyber attacks on their respective systems.

Iran has placed the blame on Israel for crippling attacks on its public network and for spyware viruses used against its nuclear program. After the Stuxnet virus damaged the uranium enrichment centrifuges at the Natanz plant in 2009, a sabotage attributed to a joint operation of Israeli and American intelligence communities, Tehran established a cyber command with defensive and offensive capabilities.

Israel on its part has increased its cyber vigilance against attempts by Iranian hackers.

Over the last year, the U.S. has accused Iran of cyber attacks against its banks, while Saudi Arabia has placed the blame on Iranian hackers for a serious cyber assault on computers of its national oil company, Aramco.

In another hack attack this week, at least three Israeli banks received emails from an unknown individual threatening to release the personal details of millions of customers unless a payment of tens of thousands of shekels was made via the virtual online currency Bitcoin. The banks filed police complaints and reported the incidents to the Bank of Israel.

Over the last few years, Islamist hackers affiliated with the Anonymous collective have launched a number of cyber attacks on Israel, managing to infiltrate and even temporarily topple some websites during the attack.

Haaretz's website was infiltrated last April in an attack termed "Operation Israel" that the hackers claimed was meant to "wipe Israel off the map." The Education Ministry website, the Israel Military Industries website, the Israel Police's website, and about 100 smaller websites were also infiltrated; some 19,000 Israeli Facebook accounts were said to be hacked in the attack as well.

Another attack, in September, paralyzed the national road network in the northern city of Haifa, halting key operations for two days and causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. A cybersecurity expert said then that the attack seemed also to be the work of a group like Anonymous.

Originally published in Haaretz

Israeli space engineers hope to take another giant leap for mankind

Israel may not have Apollo, but its space industry is hoping to take a giant leap for mankind in 2015 to become the third country in history to land on the moon, this time in a tiny unmanned spacecraft equipped with high definition technology capable of broadcasting images back to Earth.

The initiative is the brainchild of SpaceIL, a non-profit organization founded by three young Israeli engineers who embarked on Google’s international Lunar X project about two years ago. Google has promised $20 million to the first team that successfully lands on the moon, travels at least 500 meters on the lunar surface, and brings back HD video, images and data. As a further incentive for the competing teams, the prize will drop to $15 million if a government funded project beats them to it - a goal which China hopes to achieve this year.

But for founders Yariv Bash, 31, Kfir Damari, 30, and Yonatan Weintraub, 26, and their staff of dedicated engineers and volunteers, the project is not about the money. Above all else, they say, SpaceIL is a "national project" aimed at advancing Israel’s scientific and technological fields, and inspiring the next generation. They have committed to putting all of their prize money, should they win, into science and scientific education in Israel.

“We want these things to be happening in 20 years, when we retire,” said Eyal Sagi, the chief systems engineer for the project. “If we can show [the youth] that there is a future in this work, that will have been our greatest achievement.”

The project has attracted some 200 volunteers, many of them high school and university students, and the staff comprises predominantly young engineers, technicians, and space enthusiasts. Adam Green, a 24-year-old graduate of aerospace engineering from the United Kingdom, came to Israel specifically for this project and has since become a major part of the ground control team that will monitor the moon flight as it happens.

Amit Levin, a 15-year-old who learned about the project when SpaceIL visited his extracurricular physics class at Tel Aviv University, is a volunteer on a team tasked with another major goal - identifying a proper landing spot on the moon.

“Can you imagine, someone comes into your classroom and asks if you want to work on a satellite to the moon?” said Levin. “It was like the messiah had arrived.”

The Google prize money would not even cover the estimated cost of the SpaceIL project, which stands at some $30 million - a sum the organization has not quite reached. Including pledged donations, it has secured about $20 million dollars so far from private donors and institutions.

“We believe we can complete the building of the spaceship by 2015, but the major challenge is finding the appropriate launch [site]. This is critical for the project,” said Yanki Margalit, chairman of SpaceIL. “If we want to achieve the mission, we don’t just need to build the spaceship. We need to secure a launch. This is a financial thing.”

While there is no official ranking among the competitors, the group believes it is in the top three. Margalit told Haaretz that NASA’s Pete Worden has already pegged the Israeli team as most likely to achieve the mission on time.

Funding for SpaceIL comes from, among others, South African-born businessman Morris Kahn, who approached the team at the beginning of the venture, and asked if they had the money for the project. He gave them a seed of $100,000 and has since contributed hundreds of thousands more, recently pledging another $2.5 million to finance about half of the actual launch, provided the sum is matched by another donor.

The project is also backed by the Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), the Weizmann Institute, the Technion, Tel Aviv University, the Rafael – Israel Armament Development Authority, Elbit and Gilat. Bezeq partnered up in early February and has taken on the responsibility of transmitting broadcasts arriving from the spacecraft to the satellite station to the control center - a distance of 384,000 kilometers.

SpaceIL is still seeking donations from philanthropists, cloud funding, and hopes to secure other commercial sponsorships like the one it now has with Bezeq.

The Israeli team, along with the other competitors, is working closely with NASA to prepare for the launch.

“We provide technical information and advice as requested within the limits of ITAR and other legal restrictions,” said Pete Worden, Director of NASA's Ames Research Center (ARC) at Moffett Field, Calif. “In some cases, when more extensive help is requested we can provide information, facilities and testing support on a reimbursable basis through what is called a space act agreement.”

So how will the moon flight actually work?

The first Israeli spacecraft to the moon is tiny, expected to weigh less than 140 kg with a diameter of just 72 x 72 x 96 cm. More than 70 percent of the craft’s weight will come from four tanks carrying 90 kg of fuel.

The trip itself is 384,000 km long and will take about two months total. In stage one, the spacecraft is expected to settle into orbit within a month, about 100 km from the moon; in stage two, the spacecraft will make its descent from 100 km above themoon’s surface, to a height of 15 km; at this point, the final two stages will begin: landing on the moon and exploring its surface.

After it has "hitchhiked" on a foreign space company's satellite for the actual launch into orbit, the spacecraft will land on the moon at sunrise, using special “eyes” designed by the Weizmann Institute, and remain there for two days before making the “jump” 220 meters above the lunar surface to travel the 500 meters required for exploration.

SpaceIL still has two years to build the actual spaceship, secure funding and a launch partner, and prepare for the journey. SpaceIL recently concluded its Preliminary Design Review, which is essentially the how-to manual for building the final spacecraft.

“It’s not just a vision anymore, or a dream anymore, it’s a several thousand page book that tells us how to do it,” said Margalit.

Originally published in Haaretz

Israelis must shun racism, not African migrants

I live in south Tel Aviv. I live in Little Africa. I wouldn't want to live anywhere else in this city. It is an oasis of multi-ethnicity in an otherwise insular and homogenous society, where one is just as likely to hear Tigrinya as Hebrew, where African lilts accent English rather than American or British twangs.

In my part of Tel Aviv, some of the veteran residents, themselves long-ostracized by the so-called Israeli elite, have begun to take the law into their own hands to rid the country of African "infiltrators."

What began this year as a series of ugly protests that would have made any proponent of human tolerance cringe in discomfort if not outright disgust, has grown increasingly violent over the last few months, culminating this week in a full-blown lynch reminiscent of the early days of Nazism and the Civil Rights movements, complete with burning cars and looted stores. It was a pogrom in every sense of the word that we as Jews would understand.

The racism that has engulfed Israeli society cannot be ignored, lest we wish to destroy ourselves. History has taught us what becomes of society that dismisses such actions as the work of a marginal handful; what becomes of a society that refuses to recognize hate by its name.

Nobody was killed in the May 23 riots in south Tel Aviv. No innocent African refugee or migrant has yet been killed in Tel Aviv by an Israeli civilian, but how are we to prevent that nightmare from becoming a reality?

The fabric of Israeli society is woven of vast and diverse ethnic groups, descendants of all corners of the world. The language of Israeli society is accented by dozens of dialects, accents, historical memory. Israeli society is by nature the ingathering of the exiles, a microcosm of multiculturalism within a single people.

But to Israeli society, a wider sense of multiculturalism - outside of Jewish culture - is a foreign concept. Non-Jews in Israel have suffered from discrimination since the founding of the country. And while it may seem obvious by now that Jews comes in all shapes and colors, in practice, many citizens of the Jewish state have yet to accept that.

When the first Jews from Arab nations began trickling into Israel, they were momentarily embraced as long-lost Jewish brothers, and then promptly disregarded as primitive low-class refugees. When the first Ethiopians began arriving in Israel, they were momentarily embraced as long-lost Jewish brothers, and then promptly shunted into the fringes of society, the new target of racism. When the Soviet "refuseniks" were trapped behind the Iron Curtain, they were momentarily embraced as long-lost Jewish brothers, but once they arrived found themselves fighting to belong.

I am not afraid to live alone in my neighborhood. When I came to Tel Aviv seven years ago, well before the migrants and refugees began moving en masse in to this neighborhood, I was afraid to walk these streets. It was a street filled with drunks and addicts, with dodgy characters, where just because of my size and gender, I was an immediate and natural target.

Seven years later, the real-estate inflation in the north of the city has given legitimacy to the street where I now live. Now there are cafes, art galleries, sushi bars and a music school, alongside Eritrean restaurants and stores. Now my street it is livable. Now there are young people, families – and yes, many of them are black. My street feels safe. It is home. I am not afraid to walk alone down the street at night.

I am afraid, however, to live alone in a hateful society. I am afraid to live alone in a country where my government supports discrimination and racism. I am afraid to live in a state founded precisely as a refuge for the survivors of extermination, which now condones the "distancing" of anyone who is not the same: anyone who is not Jewish; anyone whose skin is darker; anyone who has no other home, no other refuge, no other place to have an income and a comfortable life.

I am as afraid to live in the Israel of 2012 as any right-minded German should have been in 1938, or as any right-minded American should have been in the 1960s.

I am afraid that the hate of a marginal handful, encouraged by lawmakers and policy, will be accepted as the norm in this society so fearful of the other.

I am afraid what will happen if more people do not speak out against this racism.

I am afraid that it may be too late.

Originally published in Haaretz

Demilitarized Palestine? Just sign this non-aggression pact first

It will go down in history, along with the Oslo Accord and the Camp David treaty, another historic speech of vague validations and vows to break. Cowering to U.S. pressure, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said just about nothing in his much awaited foreign policy speech at Bar Ilan University on Sunday evening, when he called for immediate peace talks without preconditions and a Palestinian state stripped of military capabilities.

No preconditions from the Palestinians, Netanyahu meant to say. Israel, on the other hand, is free to scold its neighbor for starting this conflict and delaying a viable final settlement by refusing to recognize it as a Jewish state. No preconditions, but the Palestinian Authority must first topple Hamas or at least cut off all contact. No preconditions, except these conditions.

It is impossible to hold peace negotiations without preconditions. Such diplomacy is subversive procrastination. Both sides of this conflict have demands, but rather than open up negotiations with these conditions in mind, they deny their respective red lines and allow the peace process to roll in infinite still motion.

Israel and the Palestinian Authority both have preconditions; they need to lay them down and abide by them to get the peace process started again.

The Palestinian Authority must concede to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, and in return, Israel needs a concrete plan of withdrawal from parts of the West Bank – it wouldn't hurt to include the Golan Heights on a side draft either, to keep that track busy.

Israel should leave Fatah to engage with Hamas in reconciliatory talks, but the Palestinian Authority must agree to hold off elections for a unity government until a final settlement is reached on the West Bank.

The Old City of Jerusalem (and then later with Syria, parts of the Golan) must be divided accordingly, but with free access to citizens of each country. West Jerusalem and the Jewish Quarter would remain under Israeli control, as its capital, and East Jerusalem and the Muslim Quarter would be Palestinian, as their capital. The rest would be annexed to international supervision, with United Nations troops standing guard.

Following these steps comes the creation of a Palestinian state. Netanyahu declared that he would endorse such an entity if the international community could guarantee its demilitarization. There are a handful of countries out there without an offensive army – Japan and Costa Rica, for instance; Palestine would not be the first.

Should a demilitarized Palestine be established, then Israel would have to compromise for denying a sovereign democracy the right of defense. Israel and Palestine must therefore sign a pact of non-aggression as a concession for a demilitarized state.

The Palestinian Authority has thrown the ball into Barack Obama's court, lambasting Netanyahu for “sabotaging” the peace process. Well, the game has not even started yet because neither team is ready to play. Both Israel and the Palestinians need to get out there, spell the rules of the game, and let the referee blow the whistle.

Originally published in Haaretz