Netanyahu: Israel thwarts Iranian cyber attacks ‘daily’
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Iran attempts cyber attacks on Israeli infrastructure “daily,” only to be thwarted by the Jewish state.
“Iran attacks Israel on a daily basis,” he said at the Cybertech conference in Tel Aviv on Tuesday. “We monitor these attacks, see the attacks and thwart the attacks. In the last 24 hours, Iran has said it will destroy us and target our cities with missiles. They don’t impress us because we know our power on defense and offense.”
Netanyahu also touched on the vulnerabilities of airlines, saying they can be attacked in “one hundred [different] ways.”
Cyberattacks on aircraft can come via “ground control, interference, systems within the plane and communications. It is the most vulnerable system we have – dramatically vulnerable. But everything today is vulnerable and under attack.”
The prime minister also listed a range of statistics highlighting Israeli achievements in the cyber arena.
He said all top global technology companies now have major offices in Israel, with some of those offices exceeding the size of their original headquarters in their home countries.
Netanyahu said that Israel’s strength comes from “leveraging our defense industry into the civilian cybersecurity sector.”
With 20% of the world’s investments in cyber security, he said that Israel is now number two in terms of the number of cyber security companies it hosts.
Another piece if information Netanyahu tossed out was that even as the US is 42 times larger than Israel, the US’s NSA is less than 10 times bigger than Israel’s.
Finally, he said that a key to rapid Israeli cyber growth was keeping regulation low, so that there were few limits on creativity and on international cooperation.
Netanyahu did not respond to a challenge earlier at the same conference to his control of the cyber agency which has the largest responsibility for managing election cybersecurity.
Read More: Jerusalem Post