IDF has fended off more than three billion cyberattacks since Oct 7

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Israel Defense Forces has been the target of more than three billion cyberattacks since Oct. 7, according to Col. Racheli Dembinsky, commander of the IDF’s Center of Computing and Information Systems (Mamram)

The attacks were all intercepted and no damage was done to any computer systems, Dembinsky added while speaking at the “IT for IDF” conference in Rishon Lezion on Wednesday.

The targets included operational cloud computing used by many systems serving troops on the ground during combat to share information and locations of forces.

Cyberattacks were also carried out against Israel on Oct. 7, when Palestinian terrorists invaded southern Israel, killed 1,200 people and abducted more than 250 into Gaza.

“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,” Debinsky recalled.

“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.”

Dembinsky also spoke about the challenges of dealing with computer systems overload as Israel recruited reservists for the military operations in Gaza.

“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% 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.”

In contrast to military computer systems, cyberattacks have been successful against some civilian computer systems in Israel. Iran has been orchestrating a targeted and coordinated campaign of cyberattacks against Israel since Oct. 7.

“Iran is waging a targeted, coordinated and destructive campaign of cyberattacks and anti-Israel operations against Israel, stated the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center in February.

“By late October, nearly all of Iran's influence and major cyber actors focused on Israel in an increasingly targeted, coordinated, and destructive manner, making for a seemingly boundless ‘all-hands-on-deck’ campaign against Israel. Unlike some of Iran’s past cyberattacks, all of its destructive cyber-attacks against Israel in this war – real or fabricated – were complemented with online influence operations.”

In November, for example, the Israel State Archives were breached by Iran-affiliated hackers, and the archives were only put back online last month. Additionally, hackers successfully targeted the computer systems of the city of Modiin Illit.

Last month, Israel National Cyber Directorate (INCD) warned that Iran’s growing cyber terrorism had become not only a threat to Israel, but a global threat since Oct. 7.

“We have identified that Iran is attacking its allies and other countries for information extortion and damaging digital services,” said head of the ICND Gaby Portnoy during a speech at the Cyberweek annual conference held at Tel Aviv University.

“The information stolen from government systems is then used for Iranian cyberterrorism,” he added.