10/17/2024

Hacker Charged with Seeking to Kill Using Cyberattacks on Hospitals

The U.S. accused two brothers of being part of the hacker group Anonymous Sudan

For hackers seeking to maximize chaos, so-called denial-of-service attacks that knock targets offline with waves off junk traffic are typically more of a blunt cudgel than a weapon of mass destruction. But according to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), a pair of Sudanese brothers allegedly behind the hacktivist group Anonymous Sudan launched a spree of those crude cyberattacks that was both powerful and cruel enough in its choice of victims—extending to dozens of hospitals in multiple countries, Israel’s missile alert system, and hundreds of digital services—that one of them is now being charged not only with criminal hacking but also with the rare added allegation of seeking to cause physical injury and death.

On Wednesday, the DOJ unsealed charges against brothers Ahmed and Alaa Omer, who allegedly launched a punishing bombardment of more than 35,000 distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attacks against hundreds of organizations, taking down websites and other networked systems as part of both their own ideologically motivated hacktivism, as a means of extortion, or on behalf of clients of a cyberattack-for-hire service they ran for profit. According to US prosecutors and the FBI, their victims included Microsoft's Azure cloud services, OpenAI's ChatGPT, video game and media companies, airports, and even the Pentagon, the FBI and the DOJ itself.

“We declare cyber war on the United States,” Ahmed Omer posted in a message to Anonymous Sudan Telegram channel in April of last year, according to the indictment. "The United States will be our primary target.”

Please select this link to read the complete article from WIRED.