On Monday, a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack took down a number of Israeli government websites, leaving them unreachable for a brief period. The Israel National Cyber Directorate confirmed the incident took place.
“In the past few hours, a DDoS attack against a communications provider was identified,” the Israel National Cyber Directorate (INCD) revealed in a tweet. “As a result, access to several websites, among them government websites, was denied for a short time. As of now, all of the websites have returned to normal activity.”
A distributed denial-of-service attack is a malicious effort to disrupt a targeted server’s or service’s regular traffic by flooding the victim and its surrounding infrastructure with junk internet traffic using hijacked PCs and IoT devices as attack traffic sources. Following reports of “significant disruptions” on numerous networks supplied by Israel’s telecom carriers Bezeq and Cellcom, internet watchdog NetBlocks took action.
Although the INCD has not linked the attacks to a specific threat actor, the Jerusalem Post speculated that an Iranian-linked hacking gang might have carried out the incident in retribution for suspected attempted sabotage of Iran’s Fordow nuclear enrichment plant. With the continuing Russo-Ukrainian war opening the way for a succession of “tit-for-tat” DDoS attack operations on both sides, this isn’t the first time DDoS attacks have been launched against government IT infrastructure.
Furthermore, a flaw in Mitel’s MiCollab and MiVoice Business Express collaboration platforms was recently exploited to launch continuous Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks lasting up to 14 hours, with an amplification ratio of 4.3 billion to 1.
