Iraqi Cyberattack Targets Tel Aviv Municipality Website

It comes a week after a similar cyberattack on Israeli NTA Metropolitan Mass Transit System Ltd., which is responsible for the design and construction of a mass transit system in the coastal city in occupied Palestine.

Sabereen News, a Telegram news channel associated with Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), reported that the group, known as al-Tahera, carried out the operation on Monday.

“Do not work, it's suspended by order of General Qassem Soleimani,” the message shown after the hack read on the Tel Aviv Municipality website.

Israel’s NTA Metropolitan Mass Transit System Ltd, the company building the light rail network for the Tel Aviv area, said last week that its website was temporarily disrupted by a foreign cyberattack.

Sabereen News said a group based in the Arab country targeted the company last Monday, affecting its operating systems, control monitors, and servers. 

Last April, the website of Israel’s Airports Authority was also knocked offline due to a denial of service attack.

The targeting apparently came in the form of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, during which website servers are overwhelmed by near-simultaneous requests to connect.

The Airports Authority was one of several Israeli websites targeted in a cyberattack claimed by the al-Tahera group in Iraq.

The group said it targeted the Israeli website in an act of revenge for the assassination of top Iranian anti-terror commander Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani and his Iraqi trenchmate Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy head of the PMU, near Baghdad airport in 2020.

Israel reportedly played a covert role in the assassination, even though the criminal act was directly ordered by then US president Donald Trump.

At the time, the Telegram channel Sabareen News reported that the group had conducted DDoS attacks against the websites of the Israeli Russian-language Channel 9 and KAN news.