Dozens of Israeli websites were compromised last week as Iranian hackers and proxies of the Islamic republic rallied for their annual Quds Day cyberattack.
According to University of Haifa Professor Gabriel Weimann, while these attacks were not very sophisticated and posed a low risk to any critical investiture, Israel must continue to prepare for ongoing and more complex attacks in the future.
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"What we saw is not the high-risk operation that states like Iran can launch, and tried to launch, against Israel. Those are high-level attacks that demand sophistication, skills, and capacities to target infrastructure. Such an attack was launched against an Israeli water facility several weeks ago," he said.
Weimann, the author of Terrorism in Cyberspace: The Next Generation, believes that the coming conflicts "will be fought mostly with a keyboard and a screen and not with tanks, planes or bombs."
Israel, he said, is in a better position than most other countries when it comes to combating cyber threats.
"I think I sleep better as an Israeli than any citizen of other states. That is, I believe that in terms of cyberwar, Israel is a world leader both on the defensive as well as the offensive fronts. Not because we are smarter, but because we are challenged by more cyberattacks, have more experience in this virtual battlefield, and have advanced high-tech units in the military, the industry, and academia," he explained.
