Reports indicate that Israel’s government websites went down in an apparent online attack on Monday.
A source with Israel’s defense forces said the cyber attack was the largest ever carried out against Israel, according to the newspaper Haaretz.The cyber assault took down websites for the nation’s interior, health, justice and welfare ministries, as well as that of the prime minister’s office. All are pages on Israel’s gov.il domain.As of Monday night Jerusalem time, some access had reportedly been restored.
The cyberattack on the Israeli sites follows news of a failed Mossad operation against Iran.
The Mossad allegedly attempted to attack the Islamic Republic of Iran’s key Fordow nuclear enrichment site, Iranian media claimed on Monday night.There was no way to independently confirm the report. Tehran frequently claims to have busted Mossad cells when actually it is merely arresting local opposition elements.According to Iranian media, a statement from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) intelligence unit said a Mossad team that was seeking to carry out an act of sabotage at Fordow was arrested.Further, reports said that an employee had been given cash and a laptop to sabotage the site, but that he was caught and arrested by the IRGC.Fordow is the second most important site in terms of volume of centrifuges for enriching uranium, after the Natanz facility.
Access to the downed sites is slowly being restored after a massive “denial of service” attack.
Users attempting to enter sites with gov.il extensions were unable to for at least an hour, before the sites slowly began to come back online.“Operations have been carried out by communications companies in order to return the service as soon as possible, and the service is gradually returning,” the Communications Ministry said.“The ministry will continue to monitor [the situation] until full restoration,” it added….An official cited by Hebrew-language media reports said the National Cyber Directorate declared a state of emergency in order to study the extent of the damage caused by the “massive” cyberattack.According to assessments, the Israeli sites were taken down via a denial-of-service attack, which bombards websites with junk traffic to render them unreachable, though this remained unconfirmed.
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