For Israel, 2023 will be remembered as the beginning of the war in Gaza after the devastating Hamas terror attacks on Oct. 7.
The conflict spread to the cyber realm, with hacktivists on both sides declaring their intentions to conduct cyberattacks.
The impact of the war also affected the cybersecurity industry directly when the Israeli military summoned around 360,000 reservists - roughly 4% of Israel's 9.8 million population - who left their regular jobs to join the military operation.
Cybersecurity experts that Dark Reading spoke with at the time predicted this could affect the way Israeli businesses operate, potentially leaving some organizations vulnerable to cyberattacks or even delaying the rollout of products.
Ofer Schreiber, senior partner and head of the Israel Office at YL Ventures, says some companies he works with still currently have some staff in active reserve duty.
Many companies that Schreiber works with in Israel have expanded to Europe and the US, he says, and senior leadership is often based outside of Israel, so they were not affected by the military call-up.
Under Constant Cyberattack There were a number of notable cyberattacks against Israel before October.
These included distributed denial-of-service attacks launched on Israel's Independence Day, and physical attacks on the nation's water controllers.
The attacks on Israel's operational technology and critical infrastructure were some of the most significant cyberattacks of the year, particularly when Israel's National Cyber Directorate warned that the Polonium group had targeted critical infrastructure sectors, including water and energy, in December.
CEOs are seeing their peers being attacked, having to pay ransoms and fixing vulnerabilities after exploitation, and no CEO wants to be on their website apologizing for the incident afterward, he says.
There was other positive news for Israel on the cybersecurity defense front: Israel and the United Arab Emirates worked together on a threat intelligence-sharing platform to battle cybersecurity threats, and a few days later, news came that Israel had aided the UAE in defending against a DDoS attack.
The acquisitions of Israeli OT cybersecurity companies by Tenable, Microsoft, and Honeywell also added a boost to the country's cyber industry, and Amichai Shulman, venture adviser at YL Ventures, believes these deals will probably fuel yet another cycle of new investments, as well as new companies built by serial entrepreneurs.
Both Shulman and Schreiber say that so far there has been no new innovation in OT security in the wake of the acquisitions of Israeli vendors in that sector.
They expect that an increase in OT cyberattacks could lead to more demand for improved OT security and protection.
This Cyber News was published on www.darkreading.com. Publication date: Tue, 02 Jan 2024 16:45:22 +0000