“AN IMPRESSIVE ENEMY”
Israel’s arch foe Iran is “an impressive enemy” in the online wars, said Chuck Freilich, a researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies, which is affiliated with Tel Aviv University.
“Its attacks aim to sabotage and destroy infrastructure, but also to collect data for intelligence and spread false information for propaganda purposes”, he said.
Iran has welcomed Hamas’s Oct 7 attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive against Hamas has killed at least 34,596 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
Regional tensions have soared, particularly after Iran for the first time fired hundreds of missiles directly at Israel last month in retaliation for a deadly Israeli air strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus.
It was the most dramatic escalation yet after a years-long shadow war of killings and sabotage attacks between Israel and Iran.
Freilich argued in a study published in February that Iran was relatively slow to invest in cyberwarfare, until two key events triggered a change.
First, its leaders took note of how anti-government protesters used the internet as a tool to mobilise support for a 2009 post-election uprising.
In the bloody crackdown that crushed the movement, Iran’s authorities cut access to social media and websites covering the protests.
Then, in September 2010, a sophisticated cyberattack using the Stuxnet virus, blamed by Iran on Israel and the United States, caused physical damage to Tehran’s nuclear programme.
Freilich said the attack “demonstrated Iran’s extreme vulnerability and led to a severe national shock”.
Since then, Iran has gained substantial expertise to become “one of the most active countries in cyberspace”, he said.
