A year after admitting that it is engaged in defensive and offensive cyber-attack on its official blog, the Israeli military has revealed that it has a military base with a new unit solely dedicated to defending Israeli networks in its “Cyber War Room.” Israel considers the cyberspace as warfare of its own, which requires the same attention as others.
Brigadier General Ayala Hakim is the commander of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) Lotam Unit, which oversees cyber defense operations. He said “Cyber isn’t just another means, but a dimension that exists all the time between and during wars.” The unit gets a 24-hour attention without any break and its personnel are composed of programmers and computer experts between the age of 18 and 22.
Brigadier general Hakim said the objective of setting up the unit is “to monitor the great breadth of the Internet at a single focal point” and track malicious cybernetic activities. He went on to further say that it will enable them to assemble “open intelligence” and have a “proactive approach” in analyzing and evaluating their “situation.”
To highlight to importance of giving its cyber networks such attention, the Israeli government published that it received 44 million attacks on its main online sites during a nine-day war with Hamas in Gaza last November. It believes that a successful attack on its networks can hamper its critical infrastructure, including utilities, banking and cellphone networks, among others.
In order to discourage attacks, the newly formed unit will be working on quelling and identifying attacks before launching a counterattack. The unit is stationed at a military base in central Israel. The Israeli government is heavily investing its human and financial resources in cyber warfare as attacks continue to rise in the Middle East.
Israel prepares for cyber warfare
