Haridy says he got many responses on Twitter, but the most promising were from people who said they were affiliated with Anonymous, a group of activist hackers that famously attacked the websites of the U.S. Department of Justice and companies it deemed enemies of WikiLeaks such as MasterCard and Amazon.
Haridy soon found himself talking to the Anonymous hackers through a Gaza-specific Internet Relay Chat, a secure mode of communications favored by hackers, activists, and gamers. In those first conversations, Haridy says the hackers from Anonymous agreed to create a step-by-step plan for getting online through either dial-up connection or other means if the Internet were to go down. These instructions were incorporated onto a website Haridy and other cyberactivists created for Vox Palestine to disseminate information to Gazans during the war. “They helped us a lot,” Haridy said in an interview. “Without Anonymous we would not have reached the surface.” Efforts to reach Anonymous were unsuccessful.

But while Haridy was putting the finishing touches on the Vox Palestine website, Anonymous was planning its own counter-offensive it had dubbed #OpIsrael. In a Nov. 17 YouTube message, a man in the group’s tell tale disguise of a Guy Fawkes mask read a message warning, “Israel, the angel of death has been called to your cyberspace.” The message claimed that the group had already defaced 10,000 Israeli websites, though Israeli officials dispute this number.

Haridy says he thinks what Anonymous is doing “is necessary,” but says he and his group had nothing to do with the Anonymous attacks. Indeed, the Gaza IRC has a rule urging participants not to discuss “DDOS attacks,” or hacks that disable a website by overwhelming it with requests for information.

A spokesman for the IDF declined to discuss cyberattacks against Israeli websites or Israel’s own cyber-operations in the war. On Monday, at a briefing for journalists, Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren, said Israel used computers to text and call cellphones of Palestinians in Gaza to give warnings before airstrikes. Israel’selectronic-warfare capability includes the ability to shut down cell networks and hack into sensitive computers controlling infrastructure like power grids. So far, though, there have only been intermittent outages in Gaza, not a widespread Internet shutdown.

In recent days, Israel came under attack by a kind of malware known as “Xtreme RAT.” The RAT stands for Remote Access Trojan. If opened, the RAT will burrow into the host computer and give control of the machine to the hacker.

Aviv Raff, the chief technology officer for the Israeli cyber-security company Seculert, discovered Xtreme RAT when it infected the personal email of a soldier in the IDF’s spokesman unit and then sent the attack to other emails in that account’s personal-address folder.

One IDF official who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue said the IDF was aware of the attack, but had taken steps to make sure it did not spread to other email users.