Israel’s cyber warfare

By Engr. Edgar Mana-ay

As a senior in this age of information technology (IT), the only thing I know about cyber warfare was the simple hacking of my laptop that I experienced in Houston. When I had my laptop on, there was this terrible sound and it cannot be put off anymore, then pretty soon a number appeared on the screen to contact in order to solve the problem. It was providential that my grandchildren were around and warned me not to call the number because it is a syndicated virus. They then contacted my other apo 100 miles away at College Station (a city in Texas where Texas A&M University is located) and from his school, he was able to remedy it, then installed an anti-virus software something that I cannot comprehend  at my age.

Cyber warfare is the name of a new deadly war between the Israelites and the Iranians and its proxies like the Hamas at the Gaza Strip. It is using modern technology to attack each other in order to damage the opponent’s computer or information network through computer viruses, denial of service, and generally damaging the nation’s digital infrastructure.

Last May 6, 2019, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) launched a physical attack on Hamas in immediate response to an alleged cyber assault. The IDF hit a building in Gaza Strip with an air strike after claiming the it had been used by Hamas cyber operatives to attack Israel’s cyber space. It came amid days of intense fighting between the IDF and the terror group in the Gaza Strip. The IDF claimed it has stopped the attack online before launching its air strike on Hamas. It claims it has now wiped out Hamas’ cyber operational capabilities.

This is the first time in modern cyber warfare that a cyber-attack was met with an immediate physical retaliation in real time. While the United States is the first country to respond to a cyber-attack with military force, it took them months to locate and identify the source. This resulted in a drone strike to kill British national Junaid Hussain who was in charge of ISIL’s hacker group. Hussain had also damaged personal details of US military forces online. But the Israeli attack is different to US retaliation because reaction was immediate rather than planning it for weeks or month!

Security experts believed that the impossibility of immediate retaliation became possible because of superb due diligence and intelligence gathering. As I have written in my previous articles, the original people of Gaza are captives and forcibly governed by the Hamas group which constitute only 15% of the populace after Hamas took over from the Palestinian (PLO), its first occupying master.

Gaza had already existed more than 3,500 years ago whose inhabitants were known as Capthors and later on as Philistines. In fact, the 12 tribes of Israel, when they reached the promise land, did not conquer nor occupy neighboring Gaza. Given this background, the Israelites on the other side of the boundary are provided with sufficient intelligence at this cellphone age since the Gazans are all against the Hamas occupation. Security expert pointed out that in the ISTAR (intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance) the target was developed and verified with “additional and quite likely non-cyber info” coming from the oppressed Gazan themselves.

Last April 24, the Iranians operating through Hamas in Gaza attempted to penetrate Israel’s computers that control water flow of the potable water system and wastewater treatment as well as the system that regulates the addition of chlorine and other chemicals. The attack was detected and thwarted by Israel cyber defenses. It was believed by many that Israel retaliated by conducting last May 9 the cyberattack on Iran’s Shahed Rajaee port in Bandar Abbas, the largest harbor port in the country. It brought the shipping traffic to an abrupt and inexplicable halt for days, generating pileups for miles. This Israeli retaliation that shut down a major Iranian port was a message to the Islamic Republic of Iran that it’s economic system are vulnerable to Israel cyber capabilities and a warning that civilian systems should be left out of the covert war between the two countries. But I don’t think hardheaded and fanatic Iran, whose only passion is to drive the Israeli to the sea, will heed such warning. In fact, data show that Iran is among the top five Gulf State actors active in cyber space. It is constantly and extensively active in a wide range of attacks, including attacks that aims at gathering intelligence, attacks meant to shape opinion, and attacks aimed at harming and destroying systems.

There has been an attempt to bring in rules for cyber warfare with the Tallinn Manual on the International Law applicable to cyber warfare, but this has not been ratified nor adopted by any nation or multinational organization. By the way, the Tallinn Manual is an academic and non-binding study prepared in 2009 up to 2012 on how international law applies to cyber conflicts and cyber warfare. This was written at the invitation of the Tallinn-based NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Center of Excellence by an international group of 20 renowned law experts, scholars, and practitioners. The Manual sets out 95 black letter rules governing such conflicts like sovereignty, state laws on cyber armed conflict, conduct of hostilities among others and published by Cambridge University in April 2013.

Israel’s rise as one of the world’s leader in cyber security has been boosted by the cooperation between its military, government, education and private sector, a level of partnership unmatched in the western world. It has developed advance security protocols and capabilities to respond forcefully to cyber attackers and not necessarily on the same vector as the attack. Such attacks on Israel have risen exponentially in the past several years, reaching up to 2 million attacks against crucial Israeli infrastructures ON A DAILY BASIS!

All of these cyber-attacks are continuously thwarted.