"A year ago, Israel had a taste of what a cyber attack on national infrastructure might look like when one of its cellular phone carriers crashed and left nearly a third of the country incommunicado.
The failure was later determined to be a malfunction and not an attack, but it may have helped lead to the establishment a few months later of the National Cyber Directorate, which coordinates the cyber-security efforts of government, national infrastructure and industry. Israeli websites, including government sites, are frequent targets of hackers, often for political reasons. Earlier this week, the Foreign Ministry's websites were reportedly hacked. In November, the websites of the Mossad, Israel's spy agency, and the Israel Defense Forces were inaccessible for a time, and others experienced problems for a day. Israeli officials attributed the crashes to a server glitch rather than an attack, despite a hacker group's threat the day before to protest Israeli policy."
The failure was later determined to be a malfunction and not an attack, but it may have helped lead to the establishment a few months later of the National Cyber Directorate, which coordinates the cyber-security efforts of government, national infrastructure and industry. Israeli websites, including government sites, are frequent targets of hackers, often for political reasons. Earlier this week, the Foreign Ministry's websites were reportedly hacked. In November, the websites of the Mossad, Israel's spy agency, and the Israel Defense Forces were inaccessible for a time, and others experienced problems for a day. Israeli officials attributed the crashes to a server glitch rather than an attack, despite a hacker group's threat the day before to protest Israeli policy."
