Israel’s general incharge of network security said that his country’s military faces thousands of cyber attacks daily, mostly from Iran whose “hacking capabilities are improving”.
Speaking at the Reuters Cyber Security Summit in Tel Aviv on October 31, Major General Nadav Padan who heads the military’s command, control, computer, communications and intelligence (C4I) plus cyber division, said that Iran has mounted attacks on Israel with the help of proxies like Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah.
“They are not the state of the art, they are not the strongest superpower in the cyber dimension, but they are getting better and better,” Padan told the news agency.
“As far as we know, nobody has been able to penetrate our operational systems”, Padan said while adding “sometimes when I see an Iranian tool, I can just observe it, control it and try to figure out its meaning. And other times I act very aggressively to block it.”
On October 24, 2017, Yigal Unna, the head of technology at Israeli prime minister’s cyber directorate said that Iran poses the greatest risk to the country’s cybersecurity. It was suspected that Israel and the U.S. had collaborated to create Stuxnet malware that crippled Iranian networks in 2010. Earlier this month, the U.S. President Donald Trump accused Iran of launching cyberattacks against the country’s “critical infrastructure, financial system, and military”.