'Anonymous Sudan' Claims Responsibility for DDoS Attacks Against Israel

A religious hacktivist group known as Anonymous Sudan has claimed responsibility for the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that took down the personal website of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the hijacking of his Facebook account.

In addition to these attacks on April 26, Israel's Independence Day, it is believed that the group is responsible for the attacks on the websites of Haifa Port and Israel Ports Development company that made the pages inaccessible due to excessive Web traffic. They also claimed responsibility for bringing down the National Insurance Institute's website as well as that of Mossad, Israel's spy agency.

Today, the group is claiming that they are behind the sprawling power outages in Israel, including major cities such as Tel Aviv and Beersheba, writing "Is darkness good? Why don't you have electricity?" on its Telegram channel. 

In a statement about the outages, a government spokesperson stated that there was a glitch in one of the Haifa power plants resulting in numerous power outages: "Regular power supply was renewed to a number of areas and will be fully renewed in the next few minutes."

While the DDoS attacks are not indicative of access to compromised systems or sensitive information and are more of a disruption for users and a less-than-critical mess to clean up, if the alleged claims of responsibility are true, the power outages indicate a hacktivist group that's aiming to up its game. However, the Israel Electric Corporation (IEC) affirms that these issues were not due to a hack of their systems, noting that "the main way to avoid such large-scale outages in such cases in the future [is] to expand the production of alternatives in the form of renewable energy."