Jerusalem, 15 March, 2022 (TPS) — Several Israeli government sites were hit by a cyber-attack on Monday night, one of the most comprehensive the country has encountered, probably the result of an attack originating from Iran.
Israel’s National Cyber Directorate stated that the attack was a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service, or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic, making it difficult or impossible to access the website.
“The attack was aimed at government and non-security websites, and especially not at public computer systems,” the Directorate noted.
As a result, access to several websites, among them government websites, was denied for a short time, about an hour.
“As of now, all of the websites have returned to normal activity,” the Directorate stated.
Minister of Communications Yoaz Handel held an assessment of the situation with the emergency services in the Ministry of Communications on Monday evening.
Experts estimate that the attack, a fairly non-complex and low-grade incident, was not carried out by a state actor, but possibly by a group ordered to do so by a regime, probably Iran.
Iran and Israel have been engaged in cyber warfare in recent years, with Iran attacking a broad array of targets, and Israel focusing on Iran’s nuclear program.
Israel has also reportedly carried out several successful cyberattacks against critical Iranian infrastructure.
However, Israel has been facing a growing number of attacks in the cyber realm in recent months.
Reuven Eliyahu, chief technology officer at the Ministry of Health, told the Knesset in November that Israel’s health system faces some 100,000 attacks on a monthly basis.
In October, the Iranian Black Shadow group hacked multiple Israeli sites.
Earlier that month, the Hillel Yaffe Medical Center’s computer system crashed after experiencing a ransom cyberattack. It took the hospital over a month to fully recover its systems.
