Cyber Defense – In Peace and War

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Dr. Gabi Siboni from the Institute for Strategic Research spoke today about cyber threats, at the WindRiver conference , in cooperation with i-HLS, dividing the subject into 2 parts – in peace and war. 

In peace times the activity can be divided into 3 parts:

• Defense organizations and companies
• Critical national infrastructures (activated by civilian bodies, supervised by the government), and –
• Civilian bodies, not having an organized guiding body and being practically unsupervised, even though damage to them can be critical – such as major news providers (ynet, nrg, i-HLS,…).

i-HLS ISRAEL Homeland Security 

There is no organization in Israel with the responsibility to check and investigate cyber events at the civilian world. The state has to provide an answer to this need. In the National Cybernetic Headquarters established in the Prime Minister Office there is a beginning of work in this direction, starting with determination of cyber severity degrees.

There are regulations at present in every subject – a restaurant asking for license is required to provide information on the number of parking lots it has, and whether it got an approval from fire extinguishing organization. The idea here is similar – to establish degrees of requirements from the companies according to various criteria, and to condition licensing of some businesses by meeting certain requirements in the field of cybernetic defense.

The Israeli Police does not investigate cyber events that are not criminal, and therefore a mechanism has to be established to deal with other cyber attacks and to give it the authority for active response. Reactions of local vigilantes (like the response of Israeli hackers and publication of Saudi credit card details) are very problematic. They look similar to citizens of Nahariya shooting Katiushas as an independent reaction towards the Lebanese border…

In wartime events, usually combined with kinetic events (missiles), an example can be taken from the Home Front Headquarter, whose role is to provide response for emergency situations