‘Cyber Winter is Coming’: Israelis Told to Brace for New Wave of ‘Iranian’ Hack Attacks

Several hundred Israeli websites were systematically hacked last week as hackers from across the Middle East marked Quds Day, a day of protest of Israel’s ‘occupation’ of Jerusalem. Before that, Israeli and Iranian hackers engaged in back-and-forth hack attacks on one another’s infrastructure, targeting port and utilities facilities.

Israel’s national cybersecurity directorate chief Yigal Unna has urged his fellow countrymen and women to brace for a new wave of hacking attacks, warning that the criminal activity could target not only internet infrastructure and data, but critical life-sustaining services such as water utilities as well.

“We will remember this last month, May 2020, as a turning point in the history of modern warfare…What we faced here in Israel with the attempted attack – a synchronized and organized attack [targeting water infrastructure]…if the bad guys had succeeded in their plot, we would now be facing, in the middle of the corona crisis, very big damage to the civilian population and a lack of water and even worse than that,” Unna said, referring to last month’s attempted hack attack of six utilities’ facilities.

Brine water flows into the Mediterranean Sea after passing through a desalination plant in the coastal city of Hadera May 16, 2010

Israel suspects Iran of being behind the water facilities attack, and reportedly launched a massive cyberattack on the major Iranian port of Shahid Rajaee on May 9 ‘in response’, temporarily knocking out the port’s computer systems. Both countries’ authorities have since claimed that the attacks caused limited damage. Neither nation has admitted to hacking the other.

The cyber czar warned that his forces were “now in the middle of preparing for the next phase to come because it will come eventually. Now we managed to mitigate it and overcome it, but I’m afraid it’s only the sign of the first major attack of a new era, of humanitarian targets,” he said.

Mossad is known to have carried out cyberattacks on critical Iranian infrastructure going back to at least 2010, when a mole installed the infamous Stuxnet malware programme into Iran’s Natanz nuclear power station in a sabotage attack. The operation is believed to have involved Mossad, the CIA and Dutch intelligence.

Sourse: sputniknews.com