‘Severe cyber attack’ paralyses part of Israel Electricity Authority

Now the hackers have conducted another cyber attack but this time on the Israel’s Electricity Authority servers.

Yuval Steinitz, Israel’s Minister of National Infrastructure, Energy and Water, told attendees at the two-day CyberTech Conference in Tel Aviv that the attack was being “handled” by his agency, as well as Israel’s National Cyber Bureau, Israeli daily Harretz reports. No suspects have been identified.

YNet News reported Wednesday that the virus was delivered to Electric Authority over email. “Israel has some experience in handling such cyber-attacks and Israel will be able to share those experiences and technologies with other states”, he stated. For example, “interference” of an IT system took down a portion of Ukraine’s power grid on December 23, 2015.

The chances are that the people behind it were only after the money and did not specifically target Israel’s electrical grid in any way or form.

A spokesperson for Israel’s electricity authority did not confirm who perpetrated the attack, but did tell Israeli newspaper Haaretz that “we are going to solve this problem in the coming hours”.

“The virus was already identified and the right software was already prepared to neutralize it”, Steinitz said according to the Times of Israel. At the moment, there’s no indication the attack extended to the country’s power grid.

“It’s just unbelievable the authority’s computer system was not properly protected”.

The attack came amid record-breaking energy usage as Israelis weathered a recent cold snap, in addition to snow, sleet, and rain. Contrary to a previous version of this post, there’s no indication Israel’s power grid was attacked.

“Terrorist organizations such as Daesh, Hezbollah, Hamas and Al Qaeda have realized that they can cause enormous damage by using cyber to attack nations”. “Cyber-attacks are a great threat and I am certain that they will become a major threat in the next decade”. “The “cyber attack” was simply ransomware delivered via phishing emails to the regulatory body’s office network and it appears in no way endangered any infrastructure”, Lee wrote.