The Israel Defense Force
says that it stopped an attempted cyber attack launched by Hamas over
the weekend, and retaliated with an airstrike against the building where it
says the attack originated from in Gaza. It’s believed to be the first time
that a military has retaliated with physical violence in real time against a
cyberattack.
Violence erupted this weekend as Hamas and the IDF
launched attacks against one another in the last three days. Hamas fired more
than 600 rockets into Israel, while the IDF conducted its own strikes against
hundreds of what it characterized as military targets. Thus far, at least 27
Palestinians and four Israeli civilians have been killed, with
more than a hundred wounded. Tensions between Israel and Hamas have grown
in the last year, with protests and violence erupting periodically. Reuters and The
Wall Street Journal have good overviews of the situation.
During the battle on Saturday, the IDF says that
Hamas launched a cyberattack against Israel. It didn’t reveal what the target
was, but told The
Times of Israel that it was designed to “[harm] the quality of
life of Israeli citizens.” It also indicated that the attack didn’t appear to
be sophisticated and was quickly stopped. An IDF spokesperson told the
publication that “Hamas no longer has cyber capabilities after our strike.”
The IDF released video that it says is of the
building that the cyberattack was launched from.
What’s
novel about this particular incident is that it appears to be the first time
that a military has met a cyberattack with a real-world response during an
ongoing battle. As ZDNet’s Catalin
Cimpanu points out, the US
targeted
a member of ISIS back in 2015 after he released US service member
records online, but that attack didn’t occur in real-time. “Israel’s response
against Hamas marks the first time that a country has reacted with immediate
military force to a cyber-attack in an active conflict,” Cimpanu writes
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