The Associated Press calls these clowns “hackers,” but they’re really the lowest link on the net parasite food chain, script kiddies with beards, using commonly available brute force cracking tools to exploit known website vulnerabilities. There’s no poetry to what they do, just cheap low-class vandalism: Arab hackers shut down Israeli sites.

JERUSALEM - Pro-Palestinian hackers shut down hundreds of Israeli Web sites as Israeli troops invaded southern Gaza after the abduction of an Israeli soldier, an Israeli newspaper reported Thursday.

The Jerusalem Post said about 700 Web sites were shut down early Wednesday morning in the campaign. Their home pages were replaced by the message, “Hacked by Team-Evil Arab hackers u KILL palestin people we KILL Israeli servers.”

By early Friday, all the Web sites mentioned in the report were back in service. The report could not be independently confirmed.

Among the sites mentioned were Israel’s largest bank, Bank Hapoalim, as well as a hospital in Haifa, BMW Israel, Subaru Israel and Citroen Israel.

The paper reported that the hacker team, with at least six members, is apparently based in Morocco and began attacking U.S. government Web sites in 2004.

This is a wake-up call to everyone who runs a website that expresses a non-jihadi opinion, however. If you haven’t already, start getting very familiar with security issues, and research the security holes in any open source or PD software you’re using. I’ve made it a priority at LGF ever since developing the LGF system.