[YNet] - Israel’s national cyber chief Thursday officially acknowledged the country had thwarted a major cyber attack last month against its water systems, an assault widely attributed to arch-enemy Iran, calling it a "synchronized and organized attack" aimed at disrupting key national 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," he added.
...Unna said the attempted hacking into Israel’s water systems marked the first time in modern history that "we can see something like this aiming to cause damage to real life and not to IT or data."
Had Israel’s National Cyber Directorate not detected the attack in real-time, he said chlorine or other chemicals could have been mixed into the water source in the wrong proportions and resulted in a "harmful and disastrous" outcome.
...Iran hasn’t commented on the attempted hacking and has played down the alleged reprisal on May 9 against the Shahid Rajaee port. Mohammad Rastad, head of Iran’s port and marine agency, told the semiofficial ILNA news agency that the attack failed to infiltrate into the agency’s systems and only damaged "several private sector systems."
Israel has not officially commented on the attack against Iran, but in an interview with Israel’s Army Radio, Amos Yadlin, a former head of military intelligence, said it was significant.
"The attack displayed the cyber ability of a world-power. It appears that this was a clear Israeli message to Iran, don’t dare to touch civilian systems, the water and electricity systems in Israel, which were attacked this past month. You, the Iranians, are more vulnerable than we are," he said.
Without discussing the attack directly, Unna said the past month marked a historic turning point in cyber warfare.
"Cyber winter is coming and coming even faster than I suspected," he said. "We are just seeing the beginning." 
|
