{"id":57014,"date":"2020-06-26T11:15:29","date_gmt":"2020-06-26T01:15:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=57014"},"modified":"2020-06-29T17:48:34","modified_gmt":"2020-06-29T07:48:34","slug":"israel-and-iran-cyber-winter-is-coming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/israel-and-iran-cyber-winter-is-coming\/","title":{"rendered":"Israel and Iran: \u2018Cyber winter is coming\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A new front has opened in the increasingly intense cyber contest between Israel and Iran. On 24 April, a water facility in central Israel was hit<\/a> by a cyberattack attributed to Iran\u2019s Islamic Revolutionary Guard.<\/p>\n

The head of Israel\u2019s National Cyber Directorate, Yigal Unna, declared<\/a> that this development would be remembered as \u2018a point of change in the history of modern cyberwars\u2019.<\/p>\n

Two weeks later, Israel retaliated with a cyber strike that temporarily disrupted operations at a busy Iranian port.<\/p>\n

The tit-for-tat cyber strikes between Iran and Israel may be a taste of future warfare. Attacks against infrastructure and industrial control systems look set to become more prominent as the cyber capacity of less advanced states grows.<\/p>\n

At the time, Israel downplayed the incident, simply describing it as an attempted attack that was dealt with by the water authority and the National Cyber Directorate. It said that no harm had been done to the water supply and that systems continued to operate without interruption. Only on 7 May was the attack first attributed<\/a>\u00a0to Iran.<\/p>\n

Subsequent\u00a0reporting<\/a>, citing anonymous foreign intelligence officials, indicated that the attack was routed through US and European servers and \u2018targeted \u201cprogrammable logic controllers\u201d that operate valves for water distribution networks\u2019. Iran was able to\u00a0seize control of<\/a>\u00a0or alter operating systems and wipe data from at least six sites, and potentially from\u00a0dozens<\/a>, although it was unable to disrupt water supplies or waste management. The level of sophistication of the attack was described<\/a>\u00a0by one intelligence official as \u2018miserable\u2019.<\/p>\n

However, an official\u00a0cited<\/a>\u00a0by the\u00a0Financial Times\u00a0<\/em>said later that the attack was more sophisticated than Israel initially thought. It was close to successful, and it wasn\u2019t clear why it didn\u2019t succeed. The aim of the attack may have been to increase the amount of chlorine added to the water, which could have triggered fail-safe measures that would have left thousands of farmers and householders without water during a heat wave and pandemic.<\/p>\n

On 9 May, a high-level security cabinet meeting was held to discuss Israel\u2019s response to the cyberattack. A report by Israel\u2019s Channel 13\u00a0quoted<\/a>\u00a0one official as saying the attack \u2018goes against all the codes of war\u2019.On the same day, a cyberattack which unnamed officials attributed to Israel took\u00a0the\u00a0Iranian Shahid Rajaee port\u00a0offline, causing traffic disruptions and chaos for several days but no permanent damage.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0reported<\/a> that Israel\u2019s outgoing defence minister, Naftali Bennett, decided that a response was needed to send a message once the Israeli media reported that Iran was responsible for the earlier attack on Israel. Bennett tied the attack directly to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Israeli media reports suggested that Israel may have deliberately leaked its responsibility for the retaliatory attack to warn Iran and deter it from future attempts.<\/p>\n

Since the\u00a0massive Russian cyberattack<\/a>\u00a0on Ukraine\u2019s electrical grid in 2016, such action against civilian infrastructure during war has gone from a theoretical fear to an unfortunate reality.<\/p>\n

Iran has\u00a0targeted infrastructure<\/a>\u00a0in the Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia\u2019s Aramco oil company,\u00a0Bahrain\u2019s BapCo<\/a>\u00a0and Qatar\u2019s RasGas, and continues to\u00a0try to\u00a0penetrate infrastructure<\/a>\u00a0in the United States. It even managed to hack an unsecured computer\u00a0controlling a dam<\/a>\u00a0in New York in 2013.\u00a0Iran is unlikely to be deterred from further attempts to do this in Israel, despite the Israeli retaliation against\u00a0Shahid Rajaee and, the reports say, Israel\u2019s vastly superior cyber warfare capabilities.<\/p>\n

In January 2019, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said<\/a>, \u2018Iran attacks Israel on a daily basis. We monitor these attacks, we see these attacks and we foil these attacks all the time.\u2019<\/p>\n

Unna stressed<\/a> that the latest attacks were aimed at causing physical damage through command and control systems. \u2018This is the first time we have seen something like this, compared to attacks that target databases, which are also serious\u2019, he said.<\/p>\n

Iran\u2019s cyberattacks are likely to continue, even though its cyber capability is not assessed as being particularly sophisticated. It reportedly relies mostly on \u2018phishing\u2019 and \u2018password-spraying\u2019 and on repurposing<\/a>\u00a0the more advanced tools of its adversaries.<\/p>\n

Hacking for harassment and espionage purposes has been common for decades, but this trend of adversaries attempting to damage one another\u2019s civilian infrastructure is likely to become an increasingly common aspect of declared and undeclared conflict. That\u2019s on top of the terrorism potential of such cyberattacks on civilian infrastructure.<\/p>\n

Unna said<\/a>, \u2018Cyber winter is coming and coming faster than even I suspected\u2019. He said we need to stand together against such attacks, which will probably get more sophisticated and deadlier.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new front has opened in the increasingly intense cyber contest between Israel and Iran. On 24 April, a water facility in central Israel was hit by a cyberattack attributed to Iran\u2019s Islamic Revolutionary Guard. …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":968,"featured_media":57021,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[713,2138,247,240],"class_list":["post-57014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-cyberattack","tag-cybersecurity","tag-iran","tag-israel"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nIsrael and Iran: \u2018Cyber winter is coming\u2019 | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/israel-and-iran-cyber-winter-is-coming\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Israel and Iran: \u2018Cyber winter is coming\u2019 | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A new front has opened in the increasingly intense cyber contest between Israel and Iran. 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