Israeli army plans offensive against US dotcom

The Israeli military machine has threatened to get heavy with a US dotcom after finding a bogus army site on one of its servers.

The homepage on israeldefenceforce.com looked almost identical to the genuine Israeli military site idf.il, even down to the "official site" proclamation. But its content has got the authorities' backs up.

The 'alternate' site has since been disabled, but was originally registered by Register.com. A whois query did not turn up any useful information on the registrant, which is hardly surprising.

The site differed dramatically from the original in certain content:

Under a picture of a woman lying on the floor next to a child and soldiers was the caption: "As you can see this Palestinian women looks very dangerous, we are not sure but she could of harmed us so we had to shoot her in the chest in front of her kid, however we have been generous enough to allow the kid who also seems to be some kind of a terrorist to go back to his father and the rest of his family."

Other headlines included: "We are happy to announce that we killed 5 new babies," and "We have successfully placed smoke and tear gas bombs in all Christian churches and Muslim mosques so the people cant pray because our Jewish settlers feel disturbed when a non-Jew prays."

You get the idea.

The Israeli army has put a warning up on its homepage about the bogus site, saying it has traced it to the US and plans to take action.

"We know the source of the Web site. It is a server in the United States," Lieutenant Jonathan Gutfarb told Reuters. "We intend to make a serious complaint to the US company that hosts this site on its server and ask for its immediate removal."

Gutfarb wouldn't reveal which US outfit should expect the complaint, and it hadn't succeeded in booting the fake site out of cyberspace by this afternoon. It was accessible and appeared to be running its own version of the warning on its homepage:

"Some Local party in Israel have set up a bogus Web site with extra fake information we believe the creators of that site are Arab Israelis or Palestinians attempting to post fake information. Our local government have been notified and they are searching for the creators of that Web site," it read today.

We were unable to determine at press time whether the host disabled the site in collaboration with Israeli government officials, or whether pro-Isreali hackers got to it first. ®

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