The 19 year-old Saudi who goes under the alias, Ox Omar, released information of 11,000 newly hacked Israeli credit cards in his second assault since he published details of18, 000 previous ones on Tuesday. (File Photo)
| by Al Arabiya with Reuters
(January 06, UAE, Sri Lanka Guardian) The young Saudi who goes under the alias, Ox Omar, who hacked Israeli account and published details of18,000 credit cards on Tuesday, released a new list of 11,000 Israeli credit cards on Saturday according to Al Arabiya.
In an interview with the Israeli newspaper, Yediot Ahronot, the hacker Omar said the newly released information include names, telephone numbers and addresses of credit card holders and he promised to expose another batch of 80,000 credit cards.
Omar said that he is determined to financially and socially hurt Israel.
“This is only the beginning and you will see that I will leak information of other credit cards that contain detailed information of Israelis, in addition to military and technical documents,” the hacker who is only 19 years-old told the newspaper.
“Israel attacks and kills innocent Palestinians and commits genocide against them, in addition to the international law violation,” he added.
Asked to comment on whether he thought he was hurting Israeli Arabs, he dismissed the notion that Arabs live in Israel adding that, “Arabs live in occupied Palestine and Israel is a just part of the Palestinian occupied state … Arabs in Israel should help in getting rid of the occupation.”
The young hacker told the newspaper that he has purchased items totaling $200,000 from the credit cards he has hacked into over the last two years.
Dov Kotler, CEO of Isracard, Israel’s largest card company, said in a statement on Thursday that 5,200 of the credit card numbers listed by the hacker had been issued by his company. They had all now been blocked, he added.
The Bank of Israel was looking into the incident, a spokesman said.
Israel on alert
Israeli officials said on Friday they were concerned the country may be under cyber attack after a wave of credit card code thefts, Reuters reported.
Israeli officials say the hacker has also released email addresses and passwords, but have yet to confirm where he is based.
“This incident should be treated as a cyber attack,” Justice Ministry official Yoram Hacohen told the Ma’ariv daily.
“When it comes to digital felonies committed outside the country, it is difficult to locate the perpetrator if he took the correct precautions,” Hacohen added.
The data theft was one of the worst that Israel has said it has faced, and while the financial damage was reportedly minimal, the breaches have heightened concerns about the potential use of stolen information by Israel’s enemies.
“These matters are worrisome,” Science and Technology Minister Daniel Hershkowitz told Israel Radio, calling the incident “a sample of the great danger out in cyberspace.”
He added that Israel had “impressive capabilities” and was setting up an agency to deal with the issue, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged last year.
On the back of the credit card theft, a parliamentary committee has scheduled a session for the coming week to review Israel’s readiness to defend itself from cyber attacks.
“We must prepare to cope with cyber threats in anticipation of any attempts to use Internet terror to strike at Israel,” said lawmaker Ronit Tirosh, the committee chairwoman.
Some newspaper columnists speculated that hackers might be retaliating for recent attacks in Iran, including the mysterious Stuxnet computer virus that snarled its controversial nuclear computer systems.
“The peculiar incident we are facing could be a bad joke, a youthful prank, a hate-driven terror attack for beginners or the first stage in an Iranian cyber-terror attack,” commentator Ben Caspit wrote in Friday’s edition of Ma’ariv.
However, Hershkowitz dismissed such speculation, saying: “the imagination tends to soar.”
Omar wrote on his Web post: “So, I’ve started thinking of sending all Israeli credit cards I own which reaches 1M data.”
Enjoy it world! Purchase stuff for yourself online, buy anything you want,” he added.
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