Iran weaponized Israeli civilian tech to track leaders and threaten millions

For a country that just faced Iranian ballistic salvos and is watching Tehran rebuild its missile production with foreign help, the idea that the next war could start with keyboards instead of rockets is not theoretical.

By Shmuli V, Jewish Breaking News

Iran used cyber weapons to go after “every citizen in Israel, multiple times” during the war, Israel’s new national cyber chief Yossi Karadi has revealed, warning that Tehran is building kill chains that start online and end with physical attacks on Israeli leaders.

In his remarks, reported by the Jerusalem Post, Karadi said Iranian operators hacked into parking systems and other roadside cameras across Israel to quietly track the movements of senior officials and VIP convoys, with the explicit goal of planning operations to “target and harm them.”

Instead of just spraying rockets and missiles, the regime in Tehran tried to turn Israel’s own civilian infrastructure into a live sensor network against it.

Karadi heads the Israel National Cyber Directorate (INCD), the civilian arm charged with defending everything from hospitals and banks to traffic lights and water systems.

In a separate talk last month, he warned that Israel is “moments before the first real cyberwar, one in which not a single shot is fired,” and noted that Microsoft ranks Israel as the third most-attacked country on earth in cyberspace.

The picture he’s now drawing is of a campaign where ordinary Israelis — from drivers using parking apps to people receiving fake messages — were all treated as attack surfaces in Iran’s war plan.

That campaign has already produced concrete damage.

Earlier this year, Israel’s National Cyber Directorate publicly pinned a Yom Kippur cyberattack on Shamir Medical Center on Iran, saying the intrusion was part of a wider Iranian effort to penetrate Israeli institutions and leak data; in that case, patient information was exposed before the attack was contained.

Most of the time, though, the goal isn’t just embarrassment — it’s to map networks, steal credentials and quietly position malware so that on the next escalation, the regime can flip a switch.

Karadi has been blunt that Iran and its Hezbollah proxies are already using artificial intelligence to supercharge this pressure, from crafting smarter malware to scanning Israeli networks for weak points.

He describes a near-future battlefield where autonomous AI agents on both sides launch and block attacks at machine speed, while civilians experience a “digital siege” that can shut down power, hospitals and financial systems without a single missile launch.

For a country that just faced Iranian ballistic salvos and is watching Tehran rebuild its missile production with foreign help, the idea that the next war could start with keyboards instead of rockets is not theoretical.

The upside in Karadi’s message is that, so far, Israel’s defenses have held. He says the constant Iranian and Hezbollah pressure has forced Israeli cyber teams to get faster and smarter, developing AI-based tools that can correlate seemingly separate incidents and catch attackers before they break something that citizens actually notice.

The fact that Israelis could keep driving, withdrawing cash and checking into hospitals during the heaviest barrages was not an accident; it was the invisible front line holding.

But the strategic warning is unmistakable: Iran is no longer just the sponsor of terrorists firing rockets from Gaza or Lebanon.

It is actively trying to turn every Israeli phone, camera and cloud account into an entry point — and every Israeli, in Karadi’s words, has already been in the crosshairs more than once.

The war for Israel’s security is now running on two tracks at once: Iron Dome and Arrow in the sky, and an always-on, mostly unseen cyber Iron Dome trying to make sure the country can function while it fights.