The coronavirus created the largest cyber-vulnerable surface for terrorists to attack in history, Israel Cyber National Directorate Chief (INCD) Yigal Unna said on Monday.
Speaking at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism at Reichman University in Herzliya, Unna said that Israel and Western countries are, “much more vulnerable” to cyber strikes because “the most developed countries and societies are... connected and Internet-based societies.”
He continued stating that Israel and the West have “much more... single points of failure than at any point in history” in a range of sectors from health to mass transportation to energy to water.
Next, the INCD chief said that with the onset of the pandemic forcing Israel and the West to leap forward even more in digitizing their societies, they now present “the largest attack-surface any hacker or any terrorist could imagine ever.”
Unna said that this “cyber mess” combined with psychological warfare and influence campaigns could have massive new unpredictable consequences.
On the positive side, he discussed the hacking into Iran’s “notorious prison, where dissidents are held” where hackers “penetrated the system over there – and after capturing video for a couple of weeks or months – took over the facility and then they published the ugly videos coming out of the jail.
”In that case, the goal was “to change the bad behavior of the Iranian regime” since it was about ideology and “not a financial hacking.”
But, he warned, “We may also see this used by the wrong side of the equation” such as terrorist groups “demanding the release of political prisoners” who may have murdered civilians, in exchange for ending a devastating cyberattack.