A computer security firm has claimed that Israeli defence computers were successfully hacked after email attachments which contained malicious software were opened.
It has been reported that the hackers gained control of 15 computers with one of them belonging to Israel’s civil administration. This monitors Palestinians in Israeli occupied territory. It is currently unknown which agencies or departments run the other 14 machines that were compromised.
The emails containing the malicious attachment was created to look like it had been sent by the country’s Shin Bet secret security service with the attachment detailing information about the death of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Aviv Raff who is the chief technology officer at Securlet who helped to clean everything up and trace which machines had been affected by the malicious software believes that Pro-Palestinian hackers are behind the attack.
Raff’s reasoning into believing that Pro-Palestinian hackers were behind the attack was due to the similarities of another attack in 2012. This previous attack also involved to use of malicious software being hidden in an attachment. Strengthening his claim, Raff also detailed that both email messages were written and formatted in a very similar style and also shared some technical commonalities.
It is yet unknown what the attackers did with the available information after gaining control of the computers.
Raff stated, “All we know is at least one computer at the Civil Administration was in control of the attackers; what they did we don’t know.”
So far, there has been no official response from Israeli officials.
Guy Inbar who is a spokesman for the Civil Administration stated, “We are not commenting on it, we don’t respond to such reports.”
Hackers and cyber-thieves are continuously developing more sophisticated methods of attack and increasing the frequency. As a result, cyber-attacks are becoming more prevalent and therefore success rate is increasing each year.
It is vital that everyone ensures that they have an effective security plan in place which is regularly tested. This should be supported with a robust backup solution to ensure that data can always be recovered no matter what action a hacker or cyber thieves takes such as modifying or deleting the data.
