Saudi Hackers Steal Israeli Credit Card Details

Saudi Arabian hacking group Group-XP claims to have published credit card details of 400,000 Israelis gathered from various Israeli websites.

According to reports, the group hacked into Israeli sports website one.co.il,where it posted a statement about the hack and provided a link to the pastebin site where the data was published.

More where that came from

In a report by Haaretz, Group-XP’s goal was to reach the credit card numbers of one million Israelis.

“We decided to give the world a gift for New Year’s – the personal information of 400 thousand Israelis,” said the hackers in the statement, adding that it would be fun to see “400,000 Israelis stand in line outside banks and offices of credit card companies to complain that their cards had been stolen. To see banks shred 400,000 cards and reissue them. To see that Israeli cards are not accepted around the world, like the Nigerian cards”.

Investigations revealed that despite the claims, the total number of credit cards compromised is closer to 15,000, with many of the entries having been duplicated or falsified.

Of the cards legitimately compromised, 6,600 were from Isracard, 3,000 from Visa CAL and 4,000 from Leumi Card.

Isracard CEO Dov Kotler said that the figure represented about 0.2 percent of all active accounts in Israel, which has approximately seven million credit cards.

According to Israeli news site Ynet, many Israelis whose details were published confirmed that their addresses and phone numbers were correct, but that credit card details were either false or expired. The list also included Israeli celebrities, who also noted that their credit card details were false.

Cyber expert Gadi Evron told The Associated Press that the attack was “nothing special” technically and was mundane given the millions of credit card numbers stolen online daily.

“Potentially, such attacks could be devastating,” he said. “This is not one of them.”

Evron added that Israel is one of the most frequently hacked countries in the world, though the attacks generally are not sophisticated and many are linked to pro-Palestinian or pro-Arab hackers.

“As a rule, whenever there is some sort of ethnic or political tension around the world…you can guarantee that two days later or an hour later, for at least a few weeks, there are going to be some kind of online attacks going on,” he added.