Turkish Hackers Defacing Israeli Facebook Accounts

Following the Gaza flotilla incident, Turkish hackers have been defacing Facebook accounts of Israelis and uploading anti-Israeli material to them.This is the first incident (I know of) where activism on Facebook has taken the next step to hacktivism, breaking the law by hacking accounts to spread propaganda.

I doubt the apparently Turkish hackers broke into these accounts for the specific purpose of anti-Israeli defacement. The more likely scenario is they stole the account credentials by either phishing attack on Facebook (and, indeed, there was an Hebrew phishing attack on Facebook just last month) or by gathering the credentials of Israelis logging into Facebook by use of Trojan horses, such as those used for stealing bank login credentials.

Thus they are likely to already have had the user data ready for use in criminal activity, and then simply used it in this latest act of hacktivism.

Much like in the Estonian incident, in which the Russian-speaking population got engaged in attacking Estonia, those who know more on attacking computers, and those who already had resources to attack with (such as botnets) due to their existent illegal activities (such as spam), then joined the "party" and attacked, only using these more sophisticated tools rather than what the rest of the population was doing.

As researched in my soon-to-be-published paper with Dr. Robert Cialdini and Dr. Rosanna Guadagno about how the online Russian population was manipulated to attack Estonia -- whether on purpose or as an ad-hoc response to events -- the hackers in this case followed the social proof of so many people being active online, and spreading as a meme (social contagion) as a cue, and as new social norms emerged jumped on the bandwagon and launched their more sophisticated attacks.

This attack is special because it is the first active attack of Facebook accounts for the purpose of propaganda (that I know of), but it is in no way technologically innovative or shocking in concept.

Whenever there are political, ethnic, or religious tensions, the online aftermath follows in short order.

Then if the other side in this conflict has not yet attacked (whichever it may be), it gets upset by the attacks and responds in kind.

Truths to be remembered:

1. The sites attacked (or, in this case, Facebook accounts) on both sides are in the vast majority of cases not affiliated with the country in question and are, in fact, likely to be Jim's Shoes or Mumma's Orphanage.

2. This is because these are targets of opportunity found in bulk via Google search for sites in that country or by certain keywords.

3. The country in question is in the vast majority of cases not related in any fashion whatsoever to these actions taken by citizens.

4. Reciprocal attacks always happen until attacks on both sides subside a few day to weeks later.

Facebook is where many of us spend less-than-quality time with our friends these days, so that activism, as well as criminal activity in hacktivism, are likely to continue.

Follow Gadi Evron on Twitter: http://twitter.com/gadievron.

Gadi Evron is an independent security strategist based in Israel. Special to Dark Reading.