The Anonymous organization says that government e-

mail accounts and telephones have been broken into.

Today’s threatened cyber attack on Israel has begun, and the hackers are claiming successes, Channel 2 News reports. The Anonymous organization said this morning that hundreds of Israeli Internet sites had been hacked overnight in what it calls “OpIsrael”, the attack was designed to continue the operation carried out on Holocaust Remembrance Day last year. Among the targets that have been attacked are news sites, organizations that support Israel, and government institutions, but most sites were functional again within a short time.

The Anonymous organization claimed that 2064 e-mail accounts and telephones of the Israeli government had been hacked into, and that it had also hit 43,000 routers and modems in Israel. The Israel Airports Authority website was temporarily put out of action, as was the Ministry of Education site.

Most of the attacks are denial of service attacks, creating traffic loads that prevent access to the sites. Israeli defense units and government ministries were prepared for the attack and raised alert levels. Workers have been given detailed instructions, of which the main ones apply to everybody: to change passwords and not to open e-mail messages from unknown senders. Most of the sites that have been hit are believed to have had weak security.