Israeli Vice Prime Minister's Social Media Accounts Hacked With Vulgar Pro-Palestinian Message

Editor's note: Some strong language in screenshots showing the hacked accounts below. 

Israeli websites have been the target of the hacker collective Anonymous as it supports the Palestinian's efforts in the deadly Gaza conflict. One of the lastest hacking victims were the social media accounts of Israel's Vice Prime Minister by the group ZCompany Hacking Crew.

It is unclear just how affiliated, if at all, this hacking crew is with the loosely connected hactivists of Anonymous, but on Tuesday they infiltrated the Facebook and Twitter accounts of Silvan Shalom.

As of this morning Shalom's Twitter account remained compromised with curse words and pro-Palestinian/anti-Israeli messages. The hackers used English unlike Shalom who previously posted tweets in Hebrew. The hackers also updated his profile description to read that it "WAS The Official Twitter Page for The Vice Prime Minister of Israel. Now the ZHC Are Here."

Screenshot of Silvan Shalom's hacked Twitter account. (Image: Twitter)

Here's a closer look at some of the tweets posted by the hacking crew. (Image: Twitter)

It appeared that one of Shalom's Facebook pages has been taken down by administrators, but another one remained posted. Although the latter page appeared to be free from hack attacks, which means it could have been cleaned or was not the originally attacked page. Gawker pulled a screenshot of what was on the attacked Facebook page, as did the Times of Israel (see below).

This image was posted on Shalom's hacked Facebook page. (Image via Times of Israel)

This was posted on Shalom's Facebook. (Image via Gawker)

On its YouTube channel, ZCompany Hacking Crew describes itself as such:

"Z" being the last alphabet has been chosen for "ZCompany Hacking Crew (ZHC)" as its an end to injustice, extremism, Racism, Zionism, lies, illegal occupations and all such evils. We Hack/Deface for a reason, our reason for defacing is to raise awareness of the issues in the world with a main focus on Kashmir & Palestine.

The Times of Israel reported Shalom saying to a local news channel Wednesday that his social media aide was unavailable to help restore the hacked accounts as he was called in for reserve duty with the IDF.

According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, this attack comes shortly after personal information of thousands of Israelis were hacked.

The online group Anonymous and other protesters have barraged Israel with more than 60 million hacking attempts, according to the finance minister, Yuval Steinitz.

To counter the threat, Steinitz said, the government is working in "emergency mode." He claimed all but one of the attacks has been fended off, and that one knocked a website offline for only 10 minutes.

Much of the online onslaught has come in the form of denial-of-service attacks, a technique that works by overloading a website with traffic.

Tel Aviv-based security company Radware said the attacks against Israel first began surging across the web on Thursday, describing some as well coordinated denial-of-service attacks. Although such attacks can effectively knock their targets off the web, they're usually temporary and rarely do lasting damage.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.