On Tuesday, a group that calls itself the ZCompanyHackingCrew (ZHC) successfully hacked and defaced the Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Blogger accounts belonging to Israeli Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom. Furthermore, the group also claimed to have access to his Gmail account and threatened to leak his emails. On Wednesday, ZHC says it has delivered on this promise.
The Pastebin in question appears to contain Shalom’s personal phone number, as well as that of his chief of staff. It also apparently lists six of his email addresses, 20 screenshots of his various emails in his Gmail account, his entire contact list (names and email addresses), as well as confidential documents.
There are a total of 68 contacts listed. Some of them don’t have names attached, others have just the Hebrew names, but all of them have email addresses, some more than one. The hosts are the usual Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo services, but there are also some from gov.il, clearly Israeli government accounts.
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One of the leaked documents is hosted on Google Docs and according to the hackers, it contains “the personal info i.e phone names, numbers and type of participation of the volunteers engaged with govt in their activities.” There are also emails regarding a wrong transfer of funds that honestly reads to us like a phishing scam (screenshots: one and two).
While Shalom doesn’t have a large following on the aforementioned social networks, he is an important political figure with key contacts, and so this leak could end up being very significant. ZHC looks to have taken the last 12 hours or so to go through his whole Gmail account and grab all pertinent data. We expect that going through everything to determine the level of sensitivity will take even longer.
As we wrote yesterday, ZHC has distanced itself from the hacktivist group Anonymous and its #OpIsrael initiative. Nevertheless, the group also explained why it targeted Shalom:
We are not Part of any #Cyberwar #israel‘s @silvanshalom is Hacked to show solidarity with #Gaza and raise voice against Israeli brutalities
— ZCompanyHackingCrew (@Z_H_C_) November 21, 2012
See also – Anonymous attacks over 650 Israeli sites, wipes databases, leaks email addresses and passwords (updated) and Pakistani hackers deface Israeli pages for BBC, Bing, Coke, Groupon, Intel, MSN, Skype, Xbox, more
Image credit: Stephen Davies
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