"Greetings The Government of Israel. We Are DragonForceMalaysia. We are always here to punish you!"
This is the message that greeted users on several Israeli websites on Sunday afternoon after a cyberattack by a pro-Palestinian Malaysian hacker group known as DragonForce.
A month ago, the group claimed that they hacked into AcadeMe, a company that serves colleges and universities in Israel, and leaked emails, passwords, first and last names, addresses even phone numbers of registered students.
On Sunday, the hackers struck again and posted a threatening message on websites of printing companies that provide printing solutions for students or companies, with no apparent cause or intent.
"You are asking why your website got hacked by us? It's basically because we want to share our message and show the world who we are!"
On the list are websites such as https://www.kartaprint.co.il/index.html, http://pinkasim.co.il/index.html or https://www.print2go.co.il/index.html, none of which suffered any breaches to their data or content besides the message.
In one of the odder #cyber attacks I've seen, a Malaysian, anti-#Israel hacking group called DragonForce posted a message to the /index.html address of a bunch of websites for Israeli printshops. The message has stopped working on some of the sites already. pic.twitter.com/toLPq7tsdK
— Tzvi Joffre (@TzviJoffre) August 29, 2021
Cyberattacks have become a new arena for terror activity in recent years. Israel saw a number of cyber hack attempts in 2020-2021, with hundreds more thwarted behind the scenes.
The biggest fear in cyber hacking lies in the abuse of privacy - like the leakage of personal information in the DragonForce Malaysia hack in June - as well as the worry that foreign forces would be able to hijack systems and take control over national databases and operational systems.
Tzvi Joffre contributed to this report.