The Renesys blog reports “significant but sporadic Internet outages in the Palestinian Territories today. As many as half of the routed networks of the Palestinian Territories were unreachable (withdrawn from the global routing table).”
Both the Washington Post and the BBC have reported a possible hack on the Palestinian communications sector.
According to the Post, Palestinian Communications Minister Mashur Abu Daqqa told Agence France-Presse that hackers have “attacked Palestinians servers, cutting off phone and Internet service across the West Bank and Gaza.” He alleged that a foreign government was behind the attack.
Palestine was attacked via mirror sites spread around the world, he said.
According to Renesys:
“The vast majority of the 182 affected networks were customers of incumbent provider Paltel (AS12975). Fusion Services (AS42314) and Call U Communications (AS51440), which have independent international Internet transit, were also impacted. Additionally, some networks in Israel disappeared and recovered at the exact same times as Palestinian ones, suggesting problems with a common infrastructure.”
Both official and unofficial hackers from Palestine and Israel were reported as attacking each other in the last several years. On Monday, Palestine was awarded membership in UNESCO, the United Nation’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. This legitimization could have been the trigger for politically-motivated hackers.
