Because just as the ceasefire was being signed and the rockets and planes stopped flying, all digital hell broke loose online as electronic hacking attacks exploded 2500 percent.

“When the war stopped in the physical world is when it really started in the electronic world,” CloudFlare chief executive Matthew Prince told me today. “It was really stunning —  we saw a huge spike in attacks starting Nov. 21.”

CloudFlare, a content delivery network and a lot more, runs an incredible three to five percent of the internet. It’s growing 20 percent monthly, and adding 3000 customers a day. When you manage traffic that big, you see a lot of what’s going on. Which is exactly how CloudFlare was able to spot that, almost at the same time fighting between Hamas and Israel was settling down in the streets, it spiked a massive 25 times online.

Six days before the ceasefire was negotiated, Anonymous — a CloudFlare customer — announced its attacks on Israeli websites. But beyond a little spike in malignant traffic on November 18 and 19, little happened … apparently.

What did happen, behind the scenes, is that many prominent Israeli and Palestinian sites loaded up on protection — from CloudFlare. The Israeli Army, which had recently gamified its blog, became a client. In nearby Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood (the ruling party of the country) became a client.

“We try very, very hard not to take political positions and we try very very hard not to take side,” Prince told me. “We’re not selling bullets, we’re selling flack jackets.”

So as disruptive and destructive traffic to both Palestinian and Israeli sites escalated and crescendoed CloudFlare saw the attacks from botnets, DNS reflection hacks, and voluntary botnets organized by Anonymous. The more, the better, in a sense.

“Any time one of the sites on CloudFlare gets attacked, we learn and get better and all our sites get more protected,” Prince said. “So actually, Israeli sites were protecting Palestinian sites, and vice versa.”

In other words, CloudFlare is the digital United Nations. Which seems to be appropriate.

photo credit: gilberts via photopin cc

Where political discord exists, Anonymous will be there. The hacktivist group went after Israeli websites last night after the Israeli Defense Forces began live-blogging and tweeting its attack on Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Anonymous, which often makes its point by taking down websites, aimed distributed denial of service attacks what it claimed to be 40 Israeli websites, according to the New York Times. A DDOS attack knocks a website offline by sending a rush of traffic to the site’s servers, eventually causing it to overload and collapse. The group posted about its efforts on Pastebin, where Anonymous often announces and updates the public on its attacks, in a post called “OpIsrael.”

“Anonymous does not support violence by the IDF or by Palestinian Resistance/Hamas,” the group said in the announcement. “Our concern is the for the children of Israel and Palestinian Territories and the rights of the people in Gaza to maintain open lines of communication with the outside world.”

The New York Times notes that while Anonymous claims to have taken down up to 40 websites, it was likely only successful in taking down a few.

The Anonymous action might have also stemmed from IDF’s use of social media during its attacks. Yesterday, the defense force used its blog to post videos and photos of the attacks, including a video that reportedly shows a car carrying Hamas military leader Ahmed Jabari being blown up. IDF later tweeted a photo of Jabari with the word, “eliminated” superimposed over him.

Today, IDF added a Foursquare-like badge system to its blog, supplying “IDF ranks” for different levels of interaction a visitor has with the site.

Anonymous image via Shutterstock