The IAEA logo.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported a striking security breach Tuesday, admitting that hackers had stolen information from one of its servers and published it online.

According to Reuters, a group with "an Iranian-sounding name" published the information and requested a probe into Israel's nuclear program.  The IAEA is already wary of Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Reuters reports the theft may not have compromised much in the way of confidential data:

A Western diplomat said the stolen data was not believed to include information related to confidential work carried out by the IAEA. One of the agency's tasks is preventing the spread of nuclear weapons.

The hackers who posted the info call themselves Parastoo (the Persian name for birds known as swallows in English) and naturally enough they used Pastebin.

In the Pastebin post Parastoo wrote that this was their first such message and the public would be "hearing game changing news" from them frequently in the future. After publishing a list of email addresses  lifted from the IAEA's server in Vienna, Parastoo asked the owners of the addresses to sign a petition to request a closer look at nuclear activities in the city of Dimona, which is home to Israel's Negev Nuclear Research Center.

Parastoo seemed to reassure the IAEA that the hack was performed merely to get the agency's attention, writing that the IAEA's "critical information is safe with us(,) as we are brothers."

They closed with an apparent warning to Israel that doubled as a nod to Anonymous: "You are not Anonymous. Expect us."

The Muslim Cyber Fighters who DDoSed several American banks in October have insisted their project, which they called "Operation Ababil," was not sponsored by the government of Iran.

"Ababil" is an Arabic word for the same bird called "parastoo" in Persian--the swallow. There are references to the swallow in the Qu'ran, including "The Story of the Companions of the Elephants," in which a flock of birds carrying stones attack soldiers and elephants, killing them.

So--it's possible that these hacker references to swallows are just coincidence. Unless hackers have also begun to grow wings.

screengrab

Israel and Hamas may have agreed to cease hostilities on "land sea and air" but that may not stop the cyberwar. On Wednesday the ZCompany Hacking Crew (ZHC) hacked apart the online life of Israel's Vice Prime Minister, Silvan Shalom. ZHC took over Mr. Shalom's Facebook, Twitter account, his blog--just about everything. ZHC tweeted that their control was almost total:

ZHC will be publishing Zine including details of #SilvanShalom contacts,screenshots. docs tomorrow. Watchout #OpIsrael #Gaza #FreePalestine

— ZCompanyHackingCrew (@Z_H_C_) November 21, 2012

In a Pastebin post, ZHC attempted to clarify a few things about who they are, writing, "We are not part of Anonymous although we support OpIsrael."

The crew also posted multiple screengrabs of what appear to be the vice p.m.'s Gmail account as well as his defaced social media pages.

Anonymous issued a statement Wednesday afternoon in which they indicated the agreement between Israel and Hamas had prompted them to "stand down immediately from all further cyber attacks upon the IDF or Israel so as not to risk this delicate and perilous cease fire arrangement."

Anonymous stated that they also encouraged "all those cyber groups who have joined with us to also cease and desist now from aggressive acts, and give this cease-fire a chance."

Hacktivists like ZHC may continue their activities in spite of Anonymous's request. As they stated in their release of some of Vice Prime Minister Shalom's data, "Our Recent Hacking of social media profiles of Israel's VPM Mr Silvan Shalom was motivated by his recent statement in which he threatened to blow up Gaza. Gaza is not just in Palestine we are all Gaza."

So close to this, you guys. (Photo: Pinterest, duh)

Actually, being in the billion dollar startup club kind of sucks. [New York Times]

Any person with children who purchases a computer in the U.K. will be forced to apply anti-porn safety controls to it, because there's absolutely no way kids who want to look at porn will be able to get around that. [Daily Mail]

Cisco balls so hard they just dished out $1.2 billion in cash for Meraki, a wifi startup. [TechCrunch]

How did nerds impact the election? Turns out 30,000 Redditors registered to vote after President Obama linked to a voter registration page in his AMA. [The Atlantic]

According to U.S. search results, Americans care more about Twinkies than the Israel/Gaza conflict. We are all the worst. [Virtus Machina]

(Screencap: Twitter)

After announcing their intention to attack Hamas on Twitter, the Israeli Defense Force began military operations in Gaza yesterday. The Alqassam Brigades, Hamas’s military arm, also has a Twitter account, and the two have been engaging in a sparring match on the platform that elevates typically meaningless Twitter tiffs into the stuff of WWIII nightmares.

Aside from updating their followers on the death toll and the status of military strikes, both accounts have tweeted photos of children (warning: both links are graphic) injured or killed in the conflict. The IDF is letting no social media channel go untouched. They've been uploading photos of their operations to Flickr and Pinterest and publishing status updates to their official Facebook page. They also just started a Tumblr account that is littered with pro-Israel propaganda, including a photo showing a cartoon of an Israeli family in the crosshairs of a Hamas target with the message "Israeli civilians are Hamas's target."

Spreading information and even propaganda through social media channels in times of violent conflict is new territory for internet companies. The Arab Spring is often cited as Twitter's defining moment. In that case, Middle Eastern citizens used the service to communicate with each other and the press in order to foment revolution against totalitarian governments.

But this time, it’s different. As Peter Kafka of AllThingsD noted, Israel is, in essence, "using the Internet as weapon," employing the same tactics as dissidents in the Arab Spring to spread a message without a middleman. There is something grotesque and disturbing about two parties with a long history of conflict live-narrating the launching of bombs that kill civilians and destroy communities. There is no empowerment or revolution here: just a dark, sinking feeling as we watch the bloodshed unfold in real time.

And the platforms that are allowing both the IDF and Alqassam Brigades to spread their messages? Faced with a new frontier of social media manipulation, neither YouTube or Twitter really knows what to do.

(Screencap: Tumblr)

It's difficult to nail down whether or not the content disseminated by both the Hamas and IDF accounts violates Twitter's terms of service. One Twitter rule explicitly bans the “direct, specific threats of violence against others," which certain IDF tweets do seem to violate. The Daily Dot reports that the IDF Spokesperson Twitter account was temporarily suspended for about 40 minutes today, but was then reinstated. As Twitter doesn't comment on the status of individual accounts, it's difficult to suss out what the reasoning behind this was; perhaps it was automatically suspended after being flagged for removal by users. Whatever the case, it's back up now, tweeting about the rockets flying between Tel Aviv and Gaza. (A fake account, @IDFSpokesman, has been suspended.)

YouTube, meanwhile, also temporarily banned a video uploaded by the IDF that shows a "pinpoint strike" that killed Ahmed Jabari, one of Hamas's military leaders. The video was put back up after AllThingsD pointed it out. YouTube told them:

“With the massive volume of videos on our site, sometimes we make the wrong call. When it’s brought to our attention that a video has been removed mistakenly, we act quickly to reinstate it.”

As one social media analyst told the BBC, the actions of both the IDF and Alqassam Brigades on Twitter put the service in a difficult position. "They want to preserve their position as a carrier service that doesn't editorialize," he said. "On the other hand, they have terms and conditions that must be adhered to."

"This is not a decision a couple of hundred engineers in North California want to be making," he added.

And yet, as hashtagged insults and news of bombs continue to fly across these services, it's a decision social media platforms may have to make sooner or later.

(Screencap: Falcon-s.co.il)

Yesterday, the Israeli Defense Force announced on Twitter it would begin military operations on Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip. Though social media has long been used as a tool of dissent that can help foment revolution, declaring war on Twitter is a first, and it's a move that raises serious questions about war and propaganda in the age of the internet. Now Anonymous, the loose collective of hacktivists, has set its sights on the IDF, launching #OPIsrael in response to the country's decision to shut down internet service in Gaza.

According to a press release published to Anonpaste.me:

When the government of Israel publicly threatened to sever all Internet and other telecommunications into and out of Gaza they crossed a line in the sand. As the former dictator of Egypt Mubarack learned the hard way - we are ANONYMOUS and NO ONE shuts down the Internet on our watch. To the IDF and government of Israel we issue you this warning only once. Do NOT shut down the Internet into the "Occupied Territories", and cease and desist from your terror upon the innocent people of Palestine or you will know the full and unbridled wrath of Anonymous. And like all the other evil governments that have faced our rage, you will NOT survive it unscathed.

Anonymous has already begun defacing multiple pro-Israel websites, including Falcon-s.co.il and Advocate-israel.com. They've also compiled an Anonymous Gaza Care Package, which contains basic safety and surveillance avoidance information, as well as instructions for how to jigger an internet connection if Israel takes down Gaza's servers. Another document posted to Pastebin outlines how to connect to dial-up in the event of an internet outage.

A Google doc, also being circulated by Anonymous, provides information about protests across the globe in response to the IDF's military operations. A Facebook event for a protest at the New York Israeli Consulate on 42nd St. and 2nd Ave. already has over 1,000 people registered as attending.

Meanwhile, through its official Twitter account, the IDF continues its own attempts to win hearts and minds to the cause. "Good morning to our friends in #America," reads a recent tweet. "While you were sleeping, 3 Israelis were killed when a rocket hit their house." The spokesperson also retweeted a photo of a baby injured by a rocket attack in Israel.

(Photo: Fan Pop)

Just because you want to simulate living in ancient Galilee times doesn't mean you won't want to check your email while doing so. Kfar Kedem park in Israel has outfitted donkeys with wireless routers so that users can check into "My Ass" on Foursquare. Ah, ain't the future grand?

This new discovery is likely to fuel theories from security experts that Stuxnet was part of an American-led cyber program "that is still active in the Middle East and perhaps other parts of the world," says Reuters. Not the best way to win those hearts and minds!

Kaspersky Labs is the same firm that discovered Flame last month. CEO Eugene Kaspersky said portions of Flame's software code matched code from a 2009 version of Stuxnet. Stuxnet was discovered in 2010 after it hacked an Iranian nuclear facility in Natanz, damaging centrifuges used to enrich uranium.  At a Reuters summit in London today, Mr. Kaspersky said,  "There were two different teams working in collaboration," on Stuxnet and Flame.

Authorities in Washington are busy distracting the public with investigations into the source of the leaks. But meanwhile, Israel is trying to get its name attached to the cyber attacks. This weekend, an article in Haaretz quoted anonymous Israeli agents insisting it was Mossad and not the U.S. that developed Stuxnet.

As Haaretz's Yossi Melman wrote:

"The Israeli officials actually told me a different version. They said that it was Israeli intelligence that began, a few years earlier, a cyberspace campaign to damage and slow down Iran’s nuclear intentions. And only later they managed to convince the USA to consider a joint operation — which, at the time, was unheard of. Even friendly nations are hesitant to share their technological and intelligence resources against a common enemy."

If the Mossad agents are willing to talk, we're sure John McCain would like a word.