Tag Archive for: israeli

Report Says Iranian Hackers Targeting Israeli Defense Sector

/in


Cyberwarfare / Nation-State Attacks
,
Fraud Management & Cybercrime
,
Next-Generation Technologies & Secure Development

Hackers Are Leveraging Israel-Hamas War to Carry Out Attacks, Researcher Tells ISMG

Chris Riotta (@chrisriotta) •
February 27, 2024    

Report Says Iranian Hackers Targeting Israeli Defense Sector
Mandiant found suspected Iranian hackers targeting Middle Eastern defense workers. (Image: Shutterstock)

Cybersecurity researchers identified a suspected Iranian espionage campaign targeting aerospace, aviation and defense industries across the Middle East, including in Israel and the United Arab Emirates.

See Also: User Entity & Behavior Analytics 101: Strategies to Detect Unusual Security Behaviors


Threat intelligence firm Mandiant published a report Tuesday night that links a threat actor tracked as UNC1549, allegedly associated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, to a series of coordinated attacks targeting Middle East entities affiliated with the aerospace and defense sectors.


Ofir Rozmann, a senior researcher for Mandiant and a coauthor of the report, told Information Security Media Group that hackers “used decoys and lures” to gain initial access into targeted systems. They primarily used Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure to communicate with their deployed back doors – a technique used to evade detection.


Tehran-affiliated hackers “are growing overtime in sophistication and conducting tailored cyberespionage and destructive campaigns,” Rozmann said. This campaign’s primary purpose appears to be espionage but may also support other…

Source…

Hackers Blast Violent Gaza Message at a Popular Israeli Movie Theater

/in


On Jan. 23, Turkish hacktivists projected political messages about the war in Gaza onto digital signage in an Israeli movie theater.

The group, called MeshSec, targeted Lev Cinemas in Tel Aviv, one of the most frequented theaters in the country.

In imperfect Hebrew, the message read: “Stupid Jews, you are all terrorist killers. You are cowards. You will take responsibility for the hundreds of innocent children who died in Gaza. We will not give you peace, even in your movie theaters, until your massacres are over. We will destroy you all. We will limit your access to the Internet and banking services. God is with us.”

The attack is just the latest case of psychologically oriented hacktivism invading Israeli public spaces since Oct. 7.

How a Popular Movie Theater Got Hacked

Hacking into digital billboards, it turns out, isn’t so unlike hacking into any other corporate IT resource.

“Basically how it works is that there’s a computer, or a management panel that runs any content you put on-screen — it could be a billboard, screens outside of a theater, anything like this,” explains Gil Messing, chief of staff at Check Point Software. “The hackers are scanning the Internet to find any kind of exposed Internet connections, and default or no password protection, for things like this that they find interesting.

“Once they’re inside the management panel, they can change the actual content on the panel to show whatever they want. It’s kind of like changing a picture on a webpage,” he adds.

The simplicity of the attack was equaled by the simplicity of the fix. As the Lev Cinemas CEO told Israeli news outlet YNet: “There is an external system that updates our screens and trailers. The hackers got into this system, and put up their messages — and within a few minutes we got on it, took it down, and the event was over.”

Psychological Warfare in Israel’s Streets

Amid the myriad DDoS, wipers, espionage, and more peppering Israel’s various public and private industries in recent months, some hacktivist outfits have focused on spreading political messaging to civilians in the streets.

Consider: Lev Cinemas Tel Aviv is located on the upper floors of the Dizengoff center mall, located at the heart of the…

Source…

Hamas, Iranian hackers seek to leverage Israeli people’s stress

/in


Tel Aviv [Israel], December 19 (ANI/TPS): The Israel National Cyber Directorate announced on Monday that Iran and Hezbollah were behind an attempted cyberattack on the Ziv Medical Centre in Safed in late November. “The attack was thwarted before it could successfully disrupt hospital operations and impact citizens’ medical treatment,” the INCD stated. “However, the attackers managed to extract private data stored in the hospital’s systems.”

While the INCD defends Israeli civilian and government cyberspace, including hospitals, and Internet and phone service providers, military cybersecurity is a very different matter, according to Alon Arvatz, CEO and co-founder of Stealth Startup. Most computers with any sensitive information are not connected to the Internet, and Israeli soldiers operating in Gaza aren’t allowed to carry cell phones for fear of exposing their locations or other sensitive data, Arvatz told the Tazpit Press Service in an interview last month.

“We read the frustrations from their families, saying, ‘I don’t know what’s going on with my son, or wife or child.’ So it’s heartbreaking,” he said. “But from a security perspective, it means very good things about the army and how it handles it. The worst thing that can happen is that a soldier would accidentally expose his location and the plans of the army.” On Oct. 7 and since, there has been widespread speculation about how Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel in such large numbers, as well as how they were able to murder, torture and kidnap so many Israelis and others. Despite Israel’s reputation as one of the world’s cyberspace superpowers, Hamas appears to have sought to sabotage Israel’s vaunted rocket-alert system and siphon off donations intended for Oct. 7 victims, Arvatz told TPS.

Hackers Leveraging People’s StressParallel to Hamas’s ground invasion, the terrorists also launched “attacks into cyberspace, targeting various civilian and governmental targets,” said Arvatz, a veteran of the Israel Defense Force’s elite cyber Unit 8200 and author of The Battle for Your Computer: Israel and the Growth of the Global Cyber-Security Industry. Hamas’s multi-pronged attack–from land, sea, air and cyberspace–sought to…

Source…

Inside the cyber ‘war room’ where Israeli AI experts work to locate Hamas hostages

/in


“I have not slept for almost two weeks now, but every time I start falling asleep I have pictures of the hostages on my desk that get me up and running again,” says Omri Marcus, who is heading one half of the Gitam BBDO “war room” in Tel Aviv.

This time two weeks ago, Gitam BBDO was not a “war room” at all. It was a leading creative agency based in the Israeli capital.

The day after Hamas launched its attack on the country, it restyled itself into what it calls a war room, made up of volunteers who have abandoned their day jobs to turn their efforts towards trying to rescue the 203 hostages the militant group captured and are holding across the border in Gaza.

The Gazan enclave is under Israeli siege with food, fuel and water access blocked off. The territory, often likened to an “open air prison” has been under Israeli bombardment since Hamas, the militant group which govern it, launched the attack on Israel in which the hostages were taken and civilians deliberately targeted to be killed.

The war room in Tel Aviv has two floors – one utilises the talents of creatives to build support for the hostages around the world, while the other is more practical. It uses face recognition tools and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to verify whether hostages are dead or alive, and pinpoint their last recorded location within Gaza.

(Photo: Gitam BBDO group)

Refael Franco took i through the process of tracking the hostages. The group collects data on social media usage within Gaza, with graphs showing the number of texts sent and app usage on the tracked phones – even down to the number of times particular emojis were sent.

Data collected from social media usage and photos and videos from the Gaza strip are then uploaded to a software called tag box, which links it to hostages using images of them provided by their families and the military.

Any matches detected are shared with the IDF’s newest unit – the task force for finding missing and displaced people.

Franco, who founded Code Blue, a crisis management company based in Israel and Germany and is the former head of Israel’s National Cyber Directorate, showed i how one hostage had been detected from a TikTok uploaded from Gaza…

Source…