A high-profile Internet hacker has found an interesting way to deal with hostile attacks aimed at getting his own website to crash. He deflected the attack to the Israeli espionage agency, the Mossad, saying that it would know how to deal with it.
The hacktivist, a term that combines the monikers “hacker” and “activist,” is an American who goes by the name Jester and says he operates out of patriotic motives.
Over the past several years, he has been known to target a number of different entities from Julian Assange’s Wikileaks group to the Anonymous network and ISIS, the Islamic State group.
Overnight between Friday and Saturday, Jester’s website apparently came under a so-called DoS attack, a denial of service attack, or something similar, from a large number of computers, designed to disable the site.
In the early morning hours Saturday, Jester posted a tweet informing those responsible for the attack that he had redirected his website domain to that of the Mossad and added: “Good luck.” An hour later he announced that the method worked and the attack has stopped.
To the shitlords attacking my blog, I’ve pointed my domain to 147.237.0.71. Ur now hitting Israeli Intelligence Service (Mossad). Good luck.
— JΞSTΞR ✪ ΔCTUAL³³º¹ (@th3j35t3r) April 2, 2016
Asked why he would deflect the attack to the Israeli espionage agency, he tweeted: “Because they can look after themselves perfectly well. And the perps have no impact there. So fuckem, let God sort em out.”
Jester has been known since 2010 to have brought down websites in part through technology that he claimed to develop himself.
He has also been responsible for undertakings such as iAwacs, which is geared to monitoring Twitter conversations by jihadists. Time Magazine chose Jester as one of the 30 most influential figures on the Internet, and his old laptop is on display at the Spy Museum in Washington.
A response on the matter from the Prime Minister’s Office, which has responsibility for the Mossad, was not immediately forthcoming, but Israel’s Information and Communications Technology Authority told that it hasn’t seen any irregularities and that no damage was caused. “Government websites are frequently the target of cyber attacks,” the authority said.
