Hacktivists Hack Israeli Nuclear Facility

This post is also available in: עברית (Hebrew)

The hacktivist group ‘Anonymous’ has claimed a recent breach of Israel’s nuclear facility networks in Dimona as a protest against the war with Gaza. The group claimed the attack through a post on social media, stating: “As we are not as like as the bloodthirsty Netanyahu and his terrorist army, we carried out the operation in such a way that no civilians were harmed.”
According to Cybernews, the hackers allegedly stole and published 7GB of documents, including thousands of PDF documents, emails, MS Excel and MS Word files, 28 zip archives, and PowerPoint presentations from the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center.
They also claimed they did “not intend to have a nuclear explosion, but this operation is dangerous, and anything might happen,” a statement accompanied by an animated video illustrating a nuclear detonation and a call asking for the evacuation of Dimona and the town of Yeruham, which are nearby.
Nevertheless, there is currently no proof that the hacktivists have been able to breach the facilities’ operational network, and Israeli cyber security experts are claiming this attack is greatly exaggerated, and that the hackers only managed to steal unclassified documents.
It is known that the Anonymous group has been conducting an annual coordinated DDoS attack campaign named ‘Opt Israel’ since 2013, which targets various institutions in Israel. Since October 7th, many hacktivism groups and individuals expressed their active support of both sides of the war with a series of cyberattacks on governmental and media organizations and industrial control systems.
Cybersecurity experts from Cybernews explain that hacktivism is often limited to DDoS attacks that are intended to disrupt services and leak private documents, a type of attack that has a limited long-term impact. The potential of hacktivists taking over industrial control systems poses a much higher risk.