Israel's National Cyber Directorate and Population Authority are investigating the claims a hacker made on Twitter over the weekend of hacking the country's voting system and stealing the data of roughly 6 million Israelian voters three days before the 2019 Israeli legislative election.

According to the hashtags used in the tweet that disclosed the allegedly successful hacking of the Israeli voter registry, the attack is supposed to be part of the large scale #OpIsrael annual campaign coordinated by the Anonymous hactivists.

The hacker who used the "DarkCoder" handle on Twitter also posted a screenshot with the full names, identity numbers, an addresses to prove that the data breach should be taken seriously, as reported by Haaretz.

At the moment the hacker's claims are under investigation by the Israeli National Cyber Security Authority, Population Authority, and Central Elections Committee, with no evidence of a voter registry breach having been found until now.

Israeli voting system allegedly breach

Leaked data from the Agron 2006 database

The most plausible explanation right now for the screenshot posted on Twitter by DarkCoder is that he used previously leaked voting registry data from 11 years ago.

The data on 9 million Israelis from the Population Registry got leaked by a Ministry of Labor and Welfare contract worker who shared with another third party which created a searchable database dubbed "Agron 2006" that eventually ended up online. [1, 2, 3]

"The worker electronically copied identification numbers, full names, addresses, dates of birth, information on family connections and other information in order to sell it to a private buyer," according to TheJerusalemPost.

#OpIsrael an annual event

#OpIsrael is an annual "event" that starts on April 7, with the first one taking place in 2013 [1, 2, 3] targeting both government and private organizations with an online presence ahead of the local Holocaust Remembrance Day —the initial campaign was tagged as an #OpFail for multiple reasons. [ 1, 2, 3]

As previously shown, every year since 2013 on April 7 several Anonymous factions launch a large assortment of cyber attacks against Israeli targets, from website defacements and DDoS attacks to more serious data leaks.

However, most of the time, the #OpIsrael campaign mostly focuses on less defended smaller targets, very rarely having successfully impacted government targets. [1, 2, 3]