Cyber attacks increase ten-fold in Israel

By ARYEH SAVIR

(Tazpit News Agency) — The battle against terror is being fought in cyber space as well. Data provided by the International Cyber Convention at Tel Aviv University shows tthere has been a 900% increase in the cyber attacks against Israeli government sites.

“We deal with an average of 100,000 attacks a day, and in the last day we have been faced with 1,000,000 attacks”, said Major-General (res.) Yitzchak Ben Yisrael, head of the university’s Cyber Center.

Yitzchak Ben Yisrael (Courtesy Yitzchak Ben Yisrael)

Ben Yisrael pointed out that the attacks originate from all around the Muslim world and not only from Hamas, whose hacker unit is still primitive.

“We know about one million attacks on government bodies and big companies. If a private individual is attacked – we have no account of it,” he continued. “People think that cyber attacks are about data security. Those are the easy attacks. The mass of attacks are against physical infrastructure. The trains, for instance, are piloted by computers. A virus inserted into the system can cause a deadly accident,“ Ben Yisrael explained.

As an example, Ben Yisrael recalled an incident in 2012 when the Assad’s hacker unit – ‘the Syrian Electronic Army’ hacked into the computers of an arrogation system in northern Israel and shut it down.

“We initially received a notice that the entire water system in the Haifa area was down,” he said. “The good news is that it was a false notice; the bad news is that a system was actually shut own.”