Shin Bet Chief: As Leading Cyber Power, Israel Has Thwarted Attacks All Over World the Past Year

TEL AVIV – Israel has foiled cyberattacks all over the world in the past year, the director of the Shin Bet security agency said on Tuesday. 

“Israel is one of the leading cyber powers in the world,” Nadav Argaman said at the Cybertech 2018 conference in Tel Aviv. “We [Israel] are of course working with the intelligence services and security establishments around the world. We, as an organization, have very significant cyber capabilities, both defensive and offensive.”

“In the past year, we’ve foiled cyberattacks against Israeli systems from all over the world,” he added. “Today, cyber is a main tool for us in our daily work of thwarting terrorism.”

All the attacks were thwarted without compromising the respective systems they were targeting, a senior official told Fox News, but he declined to elaborate on what the targets were.

In 2017, 35 percent of 1,400 cyberattacks targeting Israel were directed at governmental institutions, while 25 percent of the attacks targeted technology companies, a recent report by Israel’s National Cyber Security Authority said. Ten percent targeted the finance industry.

At the conference, Yigal Unna, the newly-appointed director general at the Israel National Cyber Authority, warned cyber-attacks are the worst they’ve ever been and the risk is “getting darker” as more devices are becoming interconnected.

For example, Unna said, “There are more and more attempts to attack civil aviation.”

The former director of the CIA, Gen. David Petraeus, said that Israeli collaboration with the U.S. on cybersecurity is at an unprecedented level. “According to various foreign publications, our cooperation has harmed significantly Iran’s nuclear program,” he said.