When Israel’s military chief delivered a high-profile speech this month outlining the greatest threats his country might face in the future, computer sabotage was a top concern. He warned a sophisticated cyberattack could one day bring the nation to a standstill.
Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz was not speaking empty words. Exactly one month before his address, a major artery in Israel’s national road network in the northern city of Haifa was shut down because of a cyberattack, cybersecurity experts said, knocking key operations out of commission two days in a row and causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage.
The attack caused an immediate 20-minute lockdown of the roadway. The next day, the expert said, it shut down the roadway again during morning rush hour. It remained shut for eight hours, causing massive congestion.
The incident is exactly the type of scenario that Gantz described in his recent address. He said Israel’s future battles might begin with “a cyberattack on websites which provide daily services to the citizens of Israel. Traffic lights could stop working, the banks could be shut down,” he said.
In June, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Iran and its proxies Hezbollah and Hamas have targeted Israel’s “essential systems,” including its water system, electric grid, trains and banks.
“Every sphere of civilian economic life, let’s not even talk about our security, is a potential or actual cyberattack target,” Netanyahu said at the time.
Israeli government websites receive hundreds and sometimes thousands of cyberattacks each day, said Ofir Ben Avi, head of the government’s website division.
During Israel’s military offensive on the Gaza Strip last year, tens of millions of website attacks took place, from denial of service attacks, which cripple websites by overloading them with traffic, to more sophisticated attempts to steal passwords, Ben Avi said.
Under constant threat, Israel has emerged as a world leader in cybersecurity, with murky military units developing much of the technology. Last year, the military formed its first cyberdefense unit.
Israeli cybersecurity experts say Iran and other hostile entities have successfully hacked into Israeli servers this year, and that Israel has quietly permitted those attacks to occur in order to track the hackers and feed them false intelligence.
Israel is also widely believed to have launched its own sophisticated computer attacks on its enemies, including the Stuxnet worm that caused significant damage to Iran’s nuclear program.
Bracing for serious attacks on its civilian infrastructure, Israel’s national electric company launched a training program this month to teach engineers and power plant supervisors how to detect system infiltrations.
The Israel Electric Corp. says its servers register about 6,000 unique computer attacks every second.
“Big organizations and even countries are preparing for D-Day,” said Yasha Hain, a senior executive vice president at the company. “We decided to prepare ourselves to be first in line.”
The training program is run jointly with CyberGym, a cyberdefense company founded by ex-Israeli intelligence operatives that consults for Israeli oil, gas, transportation and financial companies.
On a manicured campus of eucalyptus trees across from a power plant in Israel’s north, groups are divided into teams in a role-playing game of hackers and power plant engineers.
About 25 middle-age employees attended the first day of training last week. The course will eventually train thousands of workers, the electric company said.
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