Israel Issues Chilling Cyber Warfare Warning After Iran Attacks

Defence affairs - By Zak Doffman

The Director General (DG) of Israel’s National Cyber Directorate (INCD) painted an alarming prophecy when addressing the Cyber Week conference in Tel Aviv last week. He has not been this publicly alarmist before or been this publicly open about Iran.

The threat of cyber armageddon in a world where Chinese technology powers energy, telecoms and transportation infrastructure, with its finger on some kind of virtual red button, and where Russia splinternets itself off from the west.

But there’s a much sharper cutting edge to the cyber threat in the Middle East. That means Israel versus Iran, two of the world’s leading offensive cyber states battling each other continually and quietly, while headlines focus more on the real-world battlefront.

The DG told his audience the world is heading towards the “first Cyber-Based War,” in which no shots will be fired and “a state could be attacked exclusively through cyberspace, potentially paralyzing critical systems” and creating a “digital siege.”

“This is not a fictional scenario — it is a very real trajectory,” Karadi warns. “Picture a digital siege: power stations shut down, communications severed, transportation paralyzed, and water supplies contaminated.”

While there’s a huge focus on critical industrial systems here, there’s also a focus on disinformation and direct cyber action against a civilian population, with “every citizen a target.” He referenced Operation “Rising Lion,” in which “1,200 influence campaigns targeting Israeli civilians. This means that over a two-week period, millions of citizens received or were exposed at least once to deceptive messages or influence videos.”

Again Iran looms large, Karadi says, responsible for “targeted information gathering on Israeli military, governmental, and academic figures for the purpose of physical intimidation; and a shift by Iranian threat groups from pure espionage and intelligence collection to disruptive and destructive cyberattacks.”