Israel's military scrambles to protect alerts from being
undermined as Iranian hackers came 'worryingly close' to their missile warning
system. In the wake of observing them to recognize their intent, the military
blocked them after distinguishing the hackers in 2017 and when it turned out to
be clear what their objective was.
Brigadier General Noam Shaar, outgoing head of the cyber
defense division in the army's Cyber Defense Directorate, who has been
associated with building up Israel's cyber defense operations for as far back
as 20 years, says that,“We dealt with them and built another barrier and another
monitoring system to make sure we could stop them if they tried again. We can’t
wait until Iranian cyber becomes a major, major threat,”
While the U.S. - based cyber security firm FireEye Inc. in
the wake of following attackers for a while, said in January that Iran could be
behind a rush of hacks on government and communications infrastructure over the
Middle East, North Africa, Europe and North America, Iran’s Information and
Communications Technology Ministry and Telecommunications Ministry had no
remarks on its supposed exercises.
In any case Iran has blamed Israel for cyber-attacks, as
well, most recently in November when it said it rebuffed an Israeli
cyber-attack on its telecommunications infrastructure.
Rhea Siers, a former senior official at the U.S. National Security
Office, even says that, “The Iranians have been eager ‘to make themselves known’
in the cyber domain and have certainly done so, while it is certainly true that
Israel is a key Iranian cyber target, that is different than assessing Iran’s
strength across the entire cyber domain.”
