 Cyber War in the Middle East |
| Cyber War in the Middle East |
Information Warfare (IW) definitions can be change from one to anther. MAGLAN - Information Warfare Research Lab. defines their on-going researches based on the 3 resources; (1) the remarkable papers by Michael Wilson - 7PILLARS (www.7pillars.com), (2) a message from Michael Vatis - U.S. National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC), and (3) the non-official \ internal Israeli General Security Service definition. All three are focused on the protection of National Infrastructures.
Based on the above, and after 75 days of observing and exploring the IW activity, MAGLAN strongly believes that the current digital conflict between Israel to Palestine is most likely to range from Anonymously Coordinated Internet Attacks to Describable Cyber Terrorism Conflicts. Even though, national infrastructures (NI) were and are targets (mainly against Israel), the lunched attacks were of a very low quality and caused no any damage of any type or level for the Israeli NI.
Some Facts (as of 2000/12/09):
1. Technical investigation of the Cyber Conflict weapons, can determine that top commercial Routers Firewalls, and IDSs were able to stop approximately 98% of the direct attacks from both sides of the conflict.
2. Intelligence indicates that, for the first time, a systematic operation was carried out, but the more information was collected the less direct attacks were noted.
3. About 99% of the direct attacks were executed over Internet environment. Classified networks were not involved.
4. About 97% of the attacks took the advantage of known security vulnerabilities while using common hacking tools or non-sophisticated mutations of those tools.
5. Financial losses to both sides are negligible (from the NI perspective).
6. Israelis started the conflict.
7. The Palestinians and their supporters have been much more successful.
8. Following, observing and investigating the Middle East Cyber Conflict requires the ability to read in Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, English and German.
9. Headlines in the media have been somewhat exagurated.
10. Escalation of the current cyber conflict to information warfare is seen over the horizon.