Israel admits cyber attack on its water system

Israel’s national cyber chief has officially acknowledged the country had thwarted a cyber attack last month against its water systems.

Israel’s national cyber chief on Thursday officially acknowledged the country had thwarted a cyber attack last month against its water systems, an assault widely attributed to Iran, calling it a “synchro­nised and organised attack” aimed at disrupting key national infrastructure.

Yigal Unna did not comment on the alleged Israeli retaliation two weeks later, said to have shut down a key Iranian port, but he said developments had ushered in a new era of covert warfare, ominously warning that “cyber winter is coming”.

“I think we will remember this last month as a changing point in the history of modern cyber warfare,” he said in a video address to CyberechLive Asia.

“If the bad guys had succeeded in their plot, we would now be facing, in the middle of the corona crisis, very big damage to the civilian population and a lack of water and even worse than that.”

Had the National Cyber Directorate not detected the attack in real time, he said, chlorine or other chemicals could have been mixed into the water source in the wrong proportions and resulted in a “harmful and dis­astrous” outcome.

AP