Israeli Water Facilities Under Cyber Attack Again

israelnationalnews

Two cyberattacks on Israeli water facilities have occurred recently, the Ynet news website revealed on Thursday.

One of the attacks targeted water pumps in the Upper Galilee and the second occurred in the Mateh Yehuda region.

The Water Authority confirmed the two attacks and stressed that they did not cause any damage.

“The sites in question are two small sewage facilities in the agricultural sector that were repaired immediately and independently by the local person in charge of the kibbutz and the facility, without disruption to service or actual impact,” the Water Authority said.

The report follows a cyberattack attributed to Iran in April which attempted to penetrate computers that operate rural water distribution systems in Israel.

A month later, an Iranian port facility was targeted by a cyberattack which US and foreign government officials say appears to have originated with Israel.

In December of 2019, Iran’s telecommunications minister said the country had defused a cyberattack which was “aimed at spying on government intelligence”.

Last summer, it was reported that the US had launched a secret cyber attack against Iran. The attack reportedly wiped out a critical database used by Iran’s paramilitary arm to plot attacks against oil tankers and degraded Tehran’s ability to covertly target shipping traffic in the Persian Gulf.

Iran has disconnected much of its infrastructure from the internet after the Stuxnet computer virus which disrupted thousands of Iranian centrifuges in its nuclear sites in the late 2000s.