Israel National Cyber Directorate (INCD) Chief Yigal Unna announced on Thursday that the INCD had prevented an April attack by hackers who tried to override the country's water system
TEL AVIV/MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 28th May, 2020) Israel National Cyber Directorate (INCD) Chief Yigal Unna announced on Thursday that the INCD had prevented an April attack by hackers who tried to override the country's water system.
In late April, the country's cybersystem faced "a synchronized and organized attack" that targeted the civilian water and energy infrastructure, the Unna said, noting that it was the first time in the world's modern history that someone wanted to "cause damage to real life and not to IT or data."
"Rapid is not something that describes enough how fast and how crazy and hectic things are moving forward in cyberspace and I think we will remember this last month and May 2020 as a changing point in the history of modern cyber warfare. ... 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 in a speech addressed to the CybertechLive Asia digital international cyberconference.
However, Unna said that an attack on Israel's water system had failed thanks to the INCD's efforts, expressing a readiness to repel a new wave of cyberthreats.
According to the Jerusalem Post newspaper, Unna also mentioned other recent cyberattacks that were aimed at disrupting the work of two hospitals in the Czech Republic in mid-April, a day after the country's cybersecurity watchdog said that it expected a wave of cyberattacks on one of the country's key infrastructures.
Earlier in the month, one of Iran's largest seaports, the Shahid Rajaee terminal, reportedly came under a cyberattack by Israel in response to an attempt to hack the latter's water facilities in late April. At the same time, Iranian news outlets, citing a source, reported that Tehran had confirmed these messages, but said that an attack was unsuccessful, and it had no impact on the port's operations.
