Can Israel win a cyber-war?
Newsweek questions how well Israel matches up against Iran in the event of a cyber-war. One notable example: the sophisticated cyber-operation during Israel’s military incursion into Gaza earlier this year. At the peak of the attack, Israeli government sites received 15 million junk-mail deliveries per second from at least half a million computers. The Web site for the Home Front Command, which instructs citizens how to protect themselves from rocket attacks, temporarily went dark, as did dozens of other government sites, including one for Israel’s secret service. Such cyber-operations are capable of disrupting vital communication channels between authorities and the public, which could lead to serious problems during emergencies. In fact, the Technolytics Institute, a U.S.-based think tank specializing in cybersecurity, ranks Iran as one of the top five cyber-threats in the world, with capabilities comparable to those of China and Russia. That’s not to say that Israel, home to some of the world’s leading high-tech companies, is defenseless. But the digital battlefield looks a lot more even than the real one.Well, maybe. Iran is a top 5 cyber-threat, but this country is probably tops in the world in cyber-security. Those web sites went back up quite quickly.
And Israel invented the anti-virus package.
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:19 PM
2 Comments:
Microsoft's free new anti-virus software is made in Israel.
Heh
Let's not forget that the best defense is a good offense. I would be willing to bet that in the event of hostilities, Israel will feed a worm into the Iranian net that will go viral, and will then shut down all of the infected computers at a designated time (like 1 second after each computer emails every other computer on its email list). Further, Israel probably has the capacity to shut down most of Iran's electric grid in a matter of a couple of hours, and to dramatically degrade Iran's ability to refine petroleum (i.e. largely destroy Iran's single refinery complex) in a similar timeframe.
So what's a few junk emails in comparison?
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