Credit Card Records Theft Hits Israeli 'Net Shoppers

Credit card details were stolen from 400,000 Israeli accounts. Are the Arabs becoming smarter in attacking Israel? Or is this just an small group of Saudi hackers with too much time on their hands?

A group of Saudi Arabian hackers broke into a small Israeli shopping site. Apparently 400,000 account details, credit card numbers, PINS and more disturbingly Israeli identity numbers (teudat zehut) were taken. The group threaten to publish the details on the Internet so others can use it to steal. It seems like Israelis are not concerned about the fact that Saudis did this, or that this might be an attack on the state. They are much more concerned about their own bank accounts and paying for pizzas delivered on a camel to a tent in the Saudi Arabian desert. (There was a cartoon in the paper showing a pizza camel delivery to a tent, the delivery boy calling out an Israeli name and the man in the tent saying "cool, thank you" in Arabic (shookrah). Yes, our jokes also make us think of Saudis as camel riding Arabs of the 1930's, we all need our stereotypes. )

This brings up two points we tend to put in the back of our minds: a) the war keeps on going, it shifts into higher (or is it different) gear with technology; b) we are slowly losing our unity (as we become more individual.) On both accounts the Israeli public feels these trends as slow moving and inevitable. So why worry, scream and shout? Really, why pretend to care? Well... because it matters. Not just because of nostalgia and history. Not just because our parents were Kibbutzniks and heroic fighters and we want to be like them. It matters to us how secure we are and how secure we feel. It matters to us how unified we are and how much we care about our state and our neighbors. As a matter of fact, after you take out all the differences in culture and religion between Israel and everyone else, this is what identifies Israelis as really unique. Some would say better than most. Yet the government and security forces here are not taking this lightly. Israeli companies and the security forces have been developing computer security technology for decades. This gives the state the ability to tap into resources, both technology (software, hardware) and people. The Israeli entrepreneurial spirit can also use such a breach in security and turn it into a hot selling technology. After all we are the land of tech start-ups. When it comes to unity and care for each other, that's harder to legislate and spend money to fix. Here Israelis have to act without government leadership. So we have to see how this works out. I have hopes in the way Israelis change and improve in this area too. This country has amazing record of improving, specially when it comes to social changes.

When it comes to how people really think, the story is more complicated. Nobody is naive enough to believe of Arabs not using technology. Israelis sometime forget, there are more of them and they have many more resources (read money.) Arab countries not only have more money than Israel will ever have, they can buy whatever they want on the open market... AND THEY DO! (that includes hacker resources) That point Israelis seem to forget as the country becomes richer and the landscape turns from what use to be called "quaint middle-eastern" (read: you live in a Kibbutz like setting) to "suburban sprawl something between Brooklyn and silicon valley" (read: you turned this country into just another big American looking suburb.) We all tend to think of Israel as changing for the better. We sometimes tend to think of the Arabs changing for the better too. There is some truth to this as the Arab countries use more technology and can communicate with the world better. Yet, with all this progress and hope there are still here and there dark forces lurking in the shadows.