Iran flexes its Cyber muscle to undermine Israel’s Cyber dominance in the region
It is not a hidden fact that both Iran and Israel are two top Cyber powers of the MENA region. Another important overt fact is that both these countries have a deep hostility for each other given their Geo-political alignment and approach of dealing with the regional conflicts. However, recently this hostility has escalated into a loud array of Cyber attacks especially from Iran.
Most recently news of Themidealine, the homepage of Israel’s newspaper The Jerusalem Post was hacked by Iran to feature an image. The featured image reflected the Dimona nuclear facility in southern Israel being blown up along with the text in both English and Hebrew. The text said, “We are close to you where you do not think about it.” Not only this, websites and Twitter account of the post’s sister newspaper, Maariv, were also hacked with the same image.
The conflict between Israel and Iran become a hot topic in recent months as all the attacks on Israel were linked to Iran. For instance, In October, Black Shadow (a hacker group of Iran) broke into the servers of Cyberserve (an Israeli hosting company) resulting in numerous popular websites getting taken down temporarily. Last month also, the Iranian hacking group “Charming Kitten” targeted the Israeli government and business sectors.
In terms of Cyber capabilities, both the countries Israel and Iran are powerful. Unlike other Middle Eastern nations who work in association with various foreign actors both these countries are self-sufficient.
For instance, Qatar is supported by Turkey, US-based Global Risk Advisors (GRA), Candiru and Italy’s Hacking Team while UAE is supported by Israeli firm NSO Group, Bulgaria’s Circles, and Baltimore’s Cyber Point and Saudi Arabia was supported by Germany’s Gamma International and Israeli NSO Group. Bahrain too was supported by Italy’s Hacking Team and Egypt by Chinese interception company Privis Technology for Cyber assistance.
Perhaps Iran is not very comfortable with Israel rising power in the region and that has resulted into a series of Cyber threats recently. It may be entirely to prove its Geo-political hegemony or may be for imposing its supremacy in the Cyber warfare domain. But, it certainly has put the entire region on crossfire. If this tension escalates further the region may witness one f the major full blows Cyber war between these two countries.
