Saudi hackers claim 400,000 Israeli scalps

Saudi Arabian hackers are claiming to have stolen and posted online the personal details of more than 400,000 Israeli citizens including credit card numbers, names and addresses and phone numbers, in an attempt to cause widespread disruption and discredit the country's banks.

In a posting on Pastebin on Monday, a hacker known as "0xOmar" claimed the attack had been carried out by "group-xp", which he explained was the "largest Wahhabi hacker group of Saudi Arabia".

"We have hacked a lot of Israeli servers and extracted a lot of information about Israeli people," the message read.

"We daily use these cards to solve our problems, purchasing VPNs, VPSes, softwares, renting GPU clusters, renting cloud servers and much more! We decided to give the world a new year gift, about 400,000+ Israeli people information!!!"

The hacker claimed the attack was the first in a series that would aim to expose the details of one million Israelis.

"What's fun for us? Watching 400,000 people gathered in front of Israeli credit card companies and banks, complaining about cards and that they are stolen. Watching Israeli banks shredding 400,000 credit cards and re-generate new cards (so costly, huh?)," the hacker wrote.

"Watching people purchasing stuff for theirself using the cards and making Israeli credit cards untrustable in the world, like Nigerian credit cards."

However, the scale and impact of the hack was quickly disputed by some of the banks affected.

Widespread reports from Israeli media suggest that as few as 15,000 customers' details could have been affected, with most of the details posted online claimed to have been either invalid or erroneous.

Those whose cards have been used fraudulently as a result of the hack will be compensated, according to the banks involved.