Air raid sirens sounded for over an hour in parts of Jerusalem and southern Israel on Sunday evening – but bombs never fell, leading some to blame Iran for compromising the alarms.
While the perpetrator remains unclear, Israel's National Cyber Directorate did
say in a tweet that it suspected a cyberattack because the air raid sirens activated were municipality-owned public address systems, not Israel Defense Force alarms as originally believed. Sirens also sounded in the Red Sea port town of Eilat.
Netizens on social media and Israeli news sites pointed the finger at Iran, though a diplomatic source interviewed by the Jerusalem Post
said there was no certainty Tehran was behind the attack. The source also said Israel faces cyberattacks regularly, and downplayed the significance of the incident.
"There is constant cyber activity against Israel. In terms of Israel working on increasing its cyber resilience, it is not in a bad place," the source commented. "Part of the [state's] multi-year plan is to build a cyber iron dome in cooperation with other nations. The headlines exaggerated about the sirens yesterday.
Still, the Jerusalem Post pointed out, it's another bit of escalation in a cyberwar between the two countries that has gone on for years. This latest case, one analyst told the paper, was likely an attack of opportunity against weak infrastructure that would have the greatest-possible psychological effect on Israelis.
Earlier this year, Israel's government was
hit by a series of massive distributed denial-of-service attacks that took its websites offline and led to a state of emergency being declared. Again, Iran hasn't been determined to be the culprit, and Israeli officials said they believed it was retaliation for an earlier alleged Israeli attack on an Iranian nuclear enrichment site.
While the enrichment lab assault is unconfirmed, Israel isn't innocent when it comes to cyberattacks against Iran. The Stuxnet infection that targeted Iranian uranium centrifuges was a joint US-Israeli effort, Obama administration officials
confirmed in 2012.
www.timesofisrael.com
