Israel Defense Forces (IDF) claim to have attacked a building that served as the cyber operations headquarter of the Palestinian jihad movement Hamas last weekend. As reported amongst the cybersecurity community, IDF bombed the building after a joint operation with the Israel Security Agency (known as Shin Bet).
The IDF has also ensured that this joint
operation is part of reprisals for the cyber attack on various Israeli
infrastructures, perpetrated by Hamas. If this incident is confirmed, this
could be the first time that a government took physical retaliation to respond
to a cyber attack.
“There seems to be no history of the use
of military force against a computer-attack campaign”, said experts in
cybersecurity. Hamas’s alleged cyber operations center is in Palestine and,
according to Israeli government claims, the facilities were bombed after a
clash in which around 900 rockets were detonated; finally, the ceasefire
arrived at around 4 a.m. the following day, by intervention of the Egyptian
government.
The international press has reported that at
least 4 Israeli civilians and 30 Palestinians were killed as a result of the
clash, as well as at least one hundred wounded.
The IDF report adds that this agency thwarted a
cyberattack attempt this same weekend; in detecting the origin of the attack,
the IDF arrived at the aforementioned facilities; according to cybersecurity
specialists, Israel has not mentioned more details about the alleged cyberattack.
According to experts from the International
Institute of Cyber Security (IICS), an IDF spokesman stated that, at least at
this very moment, Hamas has run out of resources to deploy cyber-war
activities; “Hamas’s cyber operations center has been destroyed”, the
spokesman concluded.
Although the information has not been
corroborated by other sources, the U.S. government has already shown its
support to Israel, its main ally in that region of the world.
