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Israeli Government Websites Targeted by Alleged Iranian Cyberattack
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Israeli Government Websites Targeted by Alleged Iranian Cyberattack

Cyberattack on Israel could be retaliation for the sabotage of Iran’s Fordow nuclear installation, expert says

A suspected Iranian cyberattack took down many Israeli websites for a short time on Monday night, including several government-owned sites such as those of the ministries of Health, Justice and Interior.

A few hours after the event, the Israel National Cyber Directorate, the government body in charge of protecting Israeli cyberspace tweeted: “In the past few hours, a DDoS attack against a communications provider was identified. As a result, access to several websites, among them government websites, was denied for a short time. As of now, all of the websites have returned to normal activity.”

A DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack is an attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic.

No person or group has taken responsibility for the attack.

But Refael Franco, co-founder of the cybersecurity company Code Blue and the former deputy director general for robustness at the National Cyber Directorate, told Calcalist magazine that the attack appeared to come from Iran. This suspicion has been backed by many Israeli news sites.

In addition, according to the Israel Hayom newspaper, around the time of the attack a message reading “surprise” in both English and Hebrew was posted on a Telegram group linked to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps.

Dr. Raz Zimmt, an Iran expert at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, told The Media Line that the attack was not too serious.

“It took down government websites for a period of time, they did not control the websites and change the content, they only denied access to those websites temporarily,” he said.

Alex Grinberg, an Iran expert at the Jerusalem Institute for Security and Strategy (JISS), said that the attack was not very significant, noting that the government websites that were affected are already restored.

“It does not mean that the Iranian cyber capacity is confined to only this type of attack,” he added.

Zimmt noted that relations between Israel and Iran have been hostile for a long time. “It happens in various spheres, we see it in Syria, in the nuclear sphere, and also in cyberspace,” he said.

He added that in recent years there have been exchanges of attacks in the cyber arena between the two countries. “The attack doesn’t have to be justified by any specific reason, it could just be part of this chain of strikes against each other,” Zimmt said.

 It does not mean that the Iranian cyber capacity is confined to only this type of attack

He said that “there is a chance” that Monday’s attack was “in retaliation for the alleged Israeli attack on Syria where two officers of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards were killed, or maybe in retaliation for any other Israeli operation that we do not know about. It is hard to know.”

Grinberg believes that the attack was payback for the alleged Israeli effort to sabotage an Iranian nuclear site.

“It is for sure an Iranian retaliation against Israel’s alleged attempt to sabotage the Fordow nuclear installation,” he said.

On Monday, an Iranian state television channel reported that the Revolutionary Guards’ security agents thwarted an attempt by an Israeli-recruited network to sabotage the Fordow nuclear site.

“It is unknown whether the Iranians really foiled it. It is not the first time the Iranians have embarked on such attacks. However, given the target of this attack it is plausible that it was indeed a retaliation,” he said referring to the Israeli government websites.

There has been a general escalation in hostilities between Iran and Israel in the last few years, Grinberg points out.

The attack doesn’t have to be justified by any specific reason, it could just be part of this chain of strikes against each other

Zimmt says that cyberspace is only one dimension of the Israel-Iran conflict.

“We have seen ballistic attacks conducted by both countries, attacks have also been conducted on each other’s ships on the Persian Gulf, and so on. The cyberwarfare is only one of the domains of the war,” he said.

Since 2010, Iran has been developing its cyber capabilities and now it has a very well-developed cyberwarfare structure that is capable of carrying out multiple types of attacks. However, Israel also has highly developed cyber capabilities.

“Israel has developed both attack and protection capacities, whereas Iran focuses more on attacking. Although Iranian capacities in the realm of cyber are very good, such as in the realm of drones, Iran’s technological and scientific clout is still much weaker than that of Israel,” Grinberg said.

Experts see this week’s events as another of the various cyberattacks which are part of a cybernetic war between the two countries that is far from over.

“The confrontation in cyberspace between Iran and Israel is not something new and will not end soon either,” Zimmt concluded.

 

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