A hacker claims to have stolen Israeli voters’ information

According to the authors of the book Learn ethical hacking, the National Directorate of Informatics and the Israeli Population Authority are investigating an alleged hacker who, through his Twitter account, claims to have hacked the Israeli voting system to steal data of about 6 million voters three days before the legislative elections in Israel.

According to the posts made by the alleged hacker and the used hashtag, Israel’s voting system would have been hacked as part of a massive campaign deployed by the group of cyber activists Anonymous against this country (#OpIsrael).

The hacker (known as ‘DarkCoder’ on Twitter) even published a screenshot showing full names, personal identification card numbers and addresses as proof that the voting system was effectively hacked, mentioned the authors of Learn ethical hacking.

Israel cyber police are investigating the claims of the alleged hacker. On the other hand, Israel’s Central Election Committee has commented that, so far, it has no evidence to prove any kind of cyber attack against the voter registration system.

According to the authors of the book Learn ethical hacking, it is most likely that this alleged cyberattack has not actually happened and, what DarkCoder shows as evidence of a crime are just actually leaked voter records in an incident that occurred around ten years ago.

On that occasion, the data of nearly 10 million Israeli voters was leaked by a public official who decided to share them with a third party which, in turn, used them to create a database for marketing work; this database would end up being exposed online.

 According to the specialists, the campaign #OpIsrael consists of a series of actions carried out year after year against public and private organizations in Israel since April 2013. Some of the groups linked to this campaign have deployed DoS attacks against some government entities. However, most of the actions undertaken focus on smaller and more vulnerable organizations, with a range of success ranging from moderate to low.