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Hacker Charged With Seeking to Kill Using Cyberattacks on Hospitals

The US has accused two brothers of being part of the hacker group Anonymous Sudan, which allegedly went on a wild cyberattack spree that hit thousands of targets—and, for one of the two men, even put lives at risk.

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 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. Anonymous Sudan has at times, in fact, appeared to have formal or informal ties to anti-Israel forces: According to prosecutors, it launched disruptive cyberattacks that targeted Israel's Tzeva Adom missile alert system on October 7, 2023, in the midst of attacks by the militant wing of Hamas that killed nearly 1,200 Israelis. Anonymous Sudan and the customers of its DDoS services would then target victims with vast numbers of those layer 7 requests in parallel, sometimes using techniques called “multiplexing” or “pipelining” to simultaneously create multiple bandwidth demands on servers until they dropped offline.

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