Iran behind massive cyberattack on Israel

The cyber attack that Israel successfully blocked was launched by Iranian-backed hackers.

Israeli cybersecurity experts are confident that Iran is behind the large-scale cyberattack exposed Wednesday by Israel’s Cyber Defense Bureau.

Israel’s Haaretz reported Thursday that the attacks were identified as carried out by a hacker group known as OilRig, which has been tracked to Iran, and is believed to be financed and directed by one of its intelligence agencies.

Saudi Arabia was also targeted in Wednesday’s massive cyberattack, but unlike Israel, failed to fend it off.

Boaz Dolev, CEO of ClearSky, an Israeli cybersecurity company that warned early this year of OilRig attacks, told Haaretz that the latest attempts against Israeli targets were “relatively well-planned and took considerable resources. It is obvious that there was intelligence gathering prior to the attack and a careful selection of targets – in this case Israeli computing companies.”

OilRig is widely known to be an Iranian state-sponsored group. Its first operations were detected at the end of 2015, and it is known to have attacked both government and private sector targets in the past, focusing primarily on Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the US, and the Jewish state.

Israel has an advanced cyber-security apparatus and fends off thousands of cyber attacks on a daily basis.

By: World Israel News Staff