IDF stopped hackers from hitting US power plants – Unit 8200 official
Deputy chief of the IDF’s Unit 8200 Col. U. on Wednesday said that his intelligence agency had previously warned the US of attempts to hack the country’s power plants in time to thwart the cyberattack.
Although this was not the first time Israeli warnings to the US to avoid cyberattacks have been made public, it was the first time a current Unit 8200 official discussed such sensitive cyber intelligence sharing in public.
The most famous known example was Israel’s 2017 warning to the US about Russia’s Kaspersky antivirus software being used as a way to backdoor spy on them or plant malware.
Col. U. recalled that an “adversary [Iran] attacked water facilities in Israel. We saw this attacker attempting to poison the water in an attempt to claim human lives. We mitigated that threat far ahead.”
“Another adversary attacked Israel,” and in the process of stopping the cyberattack, “we also found that they were attempting to target US power plants as well. This was the first indication of this attack. It enabled preventing this threat, through tight collaboration with our fantastic American partners,” he said.
Read More: The Jerusalem Post