Tel Aviv: Israel’s Iron Dome defense system has long protected it from incoming rockets. It is now building a “cyber dome” to defend against online attacks, especially from arch-enemy Iran.
“This is a silent war, which is not visible,” said Aviram Atzaba, head of international cooperation for the Israeli National Cyber Directorate.
Atzaba said Israel has battled Hamas in Gaza since the Oct. 7 attack, but it has also faced a significant increase in cyberattacks from Iran and its allies.
“They’re trying to hack everything they can,” he told AFP, pointing to Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement, but adding that so far “they haven’t succeeded in causing any real damage.” Has happened.”
He said that about 800 significant attacks had been foiled since the war began. The targets were government organizations, military, and civilian infrastructure.
Some attacks could not be thwarted, including attacks against hospitals in Haifa and Safed cities in which patient data was stolen.
While Israel already has cybersecurity in place, they were long “local efforts that were not connected,” Atzaba said.
Therefore, for the past two years, the directorate has been working to create a centralized, real-time system that works proactively to protect the entire Israeli cyberspace.
Based in Tel Aviv, the directorate operates under the authority of the Prime Minister. It does not disclose figures on its staff, budget or computing resources.
Israel cooperates closely with many allies, including the United States, Atzaba said, because “all states face cyberterrorism.”
“To fight a network, it takes a network,” he said.
Chuck Freilich, a researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies affiliated with Tel Aviv University, said Israel’s archenemy Iran is “an influential enemy” in online wars.
“Its attacks are aimed at sabotaging and destroying infrastructure, but also at collecting data for intelligence and spreading false information for propaganda purposes,” he said.
Iran welcomed Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.
Israeli retaliatory strikes against Hamas have killed at least 34,596 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
Regional tensions have risen, especially since Iran fired hundreds of missiles directly at Israel for the first time in response to a deadly Israeli air strike on the Iranian Consulate in Damascus last month.
It was the most dramatic escalation yet after years of shadow war of assassinations and sabotage attacks between Israel and Iran.
Freilich argued in a study published in February that Iran was relatively slow to invest in cyber warfare until two major events drove the change.
First, its leaders focused on how anti-government protesters used the Internet as a tool to mobilize support for the 2009 post-election uprising.
In a bloody crackdown that crushed the movement, Iranian authorities cut off access to social media and websites covering the protests.
Then, in September 2010, a sophisticated cyberattack using the Stuxnet virus, which Iran blamed on Israel and the United States, caused material damage to Tehran’s nuclear program.
Freilich said the attack “demonstrated Iran’s extreme vulnerability and caused a severe national shock.”
Since then, he said, Iran has acquired enough expertise to become “one of the most active countries in cyberspace”.
While Israel is considered a major cyber power, Iran is only likely to improve, Freilich said.
He pointed to aid from Russia and China, as well as its large populations, and an emphasis on cyber training for students and soldiers, and said the trend was “worrisome for the future.”
Atzaba stressed that the number of hackers is secondary to the quality of the technology and its use.
“For the last two years, we have been developing a Cyber Dome against cyber attacks, which works like Iron Dome against rockets,” he said.
“With Cyber Dome, all sources are fed into a large data pool that enables the big picture to be seen and a national response initiated in a comprehensive and coordinated manner.”
The Israeli system has various scanners that continuously monitor Israeli cyberspace for vulnerabilities and inform stakeholders about ways to mitigate them, he said.
Israel’s cyber strength depends on close collaboration between the public, private and academic sectors, as well as Israel’s “white hat” hackers who help identify vulnerabilities.
“We work by hand,” he said.