The Yeshiva University website was hit by an anti-Israel hacker on the morning of August 8, forcing the site to be shut down for over 24 hours.
For a short period of time immediately following the hacking, the website displayed photos of Lebanese casualties from the Israeli bombardment of Lebabon – motivated by the Shiite militia Hezbollah firing rockets into northern Israel – and beneath the explicit pictures was a demand reading “Lebanon-Israel… STOP!”
Later that day the website had been taken down, showing neither the standard Yeshiva University homepage nor the hacker’s addition. MIS scrambled in the first few hours to discern how hackers had gained access to the system, and what was required to bring the website back online.
Arthur Myers, Director of MIS and Computing, claimed that “this is the first major break-in we’ve had,” and assured The Commentator that the FBI and New York Police Department had been contacted.
The hacker, who is known as Eno7, is a part of an international team from countries that range from Argentina to Venezuela. He left his email, leno71@gmail.com, on the front page as an invitation fto contact him. When this reporter emailed that address, Eno7 quickly responded with a screen name with which to instant message him. In poor English, he fielded questions about his motivations and intentions.
“[I am] anti-war, but by this way we are anti-Israel. Israel is responsible,” Eno7 explained. Some bloggers have commented that Eno7’s demand is placed on both Israel and Lebanon, though Eno7 pledged to only hack Israeli websites.
When asked why he hacked Yeshiva University, he said, showing ignorance of his target, “yu.edu is a israel university.”
The hacker also boasted about having lifted sensitive information from the University. He described in the interview how he downloaded encrypted information, decoded it, and used the passwords to break into the system. While he said that he had stolen information, he added that he wouldn’t use it for evil. “I am not a hacker with black hat. I am a hacker with white hat,” he said. In hacker lingo, a white hat hacker is ethical while a black hat hacker is malicious.
Executive Director of University Communications Georgia Pollack said that despite the hacker’s claims of accessing sensitive Yeshiva records, this was not the case. She said in an official statement, “As far as we are aware no other University systems were affected and no sensitive or confidential information was compromised.”
Later, the hacker admitted that the information he had acquired turned out to be less valuable than he had originally expected. Since the incident, he has attacked other Jewish websites, and claims he will not relent until the war is stopped.
Within a day of the event, the YU.edu website was back online, but at the time of this writing many links were still not functioning properly.