IDF computer chief: 3 billion cyber attacks against Israel since beginning of war
All attacks were intercepted and no computer systems were compromised, says Mamram commander Col. Racheli Dembinsky
The Israel Defense Forces’ cloud computing network has faced over three billion cyber attacks since war broke out between Israel and Hamas on October 7, the officer commanding the military’s computer unit said this week, but all of the attacks were intercepted and did not cause damage.
The revelation was made by Col. Racheli Dembinsky, commander of the IDF’s Center of Computing and Information Systems (Mamram), at the “IT for IDF” conference in Rishon Lezion on Wednesday.
Dembinsky said the targets of the attacks included operational cloud computing used by many systems serving troops on the ground during combat to share information and locations of forces.
While Dembinsky did not say what kinds of attacks were perpetrated or how great a danger they posed, she stressed that all were blocked and no systems were at any point compromised.
Mamram, the IDF’s central computing system unit, handles the infrastructure and defense of the military’s remote servers.
War broke out on October 7 when Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapping 251. It has also been reported that cyberattacks were carried out against Israel on October 7. Dembinsky confirmed this.
Speaking of her experience on that day, Dembinsky said, “I received a phone call that morning and thought there was a malfunction in the alert system. I quickly understood there wasn’t a malfunction, but a broader attack. Also, we immediately understood this wasn’t fake. I put on my uniform and drove to the base. We began transitioning to emergency mode. We were required to focus on the continuous functioning of people and systems. The industry assisted us, and it, along with the reservists we recruited, acted as a force multiplier for us.”
Among the war’s main challenges was dealing with the overloading of computer systems caused by the large amount of manpower using them. “The recruitment of reservists and the growth in the amount of users brought about a few peaks. One of the peaks was reasonable, but another one, on October 27, the eve of the IDF’s ground incursion in the Gaza Strip, brought an extraordinary amount of users.
“We reached a situation where we were allocating computing resources at 120 percent capacity. We realized that if we didn’t address the overloads and slowdowns, the situation would overwhelm us. Therefore, during the first weeks of the war, we took two approaches: regulating computing and storage resources, as well as adding more servers to the data centers. This wasn’t enough, so we established an additional data center to provide computing support for operational capabilities.”
Since the beginning of the war, some cyberattacks have been successfully carried out against civilian computer systems in Israel. In November, Iranian-backed hackers attacked the Israel State Archives, which was only put back online last month. Hackers also successfully attacked the computer systems of the city of Modiin Illit.
Last month, Israel’s cyber defense chief Gaby Portnoy said the nature of cyber attacks by Iran since the outbreak of the war has been more aggressive, not just against Israel, but also against its own allies.