Palestinian Busted For Hacking High-Tech Israeli Military Drones
JERUSALEM – Israel has charged a Palestinian computer hacker from the Gaza Strip with breaking into Israeli military drone camera systems for Islamic militants and gleaning details of civilian aircraft movements.
Beersheba District Court said on Wednesday it had charged Majd Oweida, 22, with designing several computer programs to help the Islamic Jihad group – for which he had been working since 2011 – to access Israeli networks.
The court in southern Israel did not reveal details of how and where Oweida was taken into Israeli custody. Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip declined to comment on the arrest.
According to the court statement, the charges against Oweida include helping Islamic Jihad hack into and monitor broadcasts from Israeli drones flying above Gaza.
It said he also hacked signals from Israeli police street cameras and collected flight information from the country’s main Ben Gurion airport outside Tel Aviv. (Writing by Ori Lewis; Editing by Tom Heneghan)
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO