Posted on 04/25/22
| News Source: Arutz-7
On the 14th of March, the Israeli government suffered a DDoS attack that affected several government sites, including the Justice and Welfare, Health, and Interior Ministry websites. According to Haaretz, the Israeli daily, a source within the Israeli defense stated that the cyber-attack is perhaps the largest the country has ever witnessed.
Israel's National Cyber Directorate said on Twitter, "In the past few hours, a DDoS attack against a communications provider was identified. 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."
However, the internet watchdog organization NetBlocks did state that later on the day of the attack, the websites were indeed accessible inside Israel but "unreachable internationally."
This was confirmed by AFP journalists who, just after 2000 GMT, tried to reach several government sites, including the National Cyber Directorate website but found them inaccessible.
In a report published last year, the agency said that cyberattacks worldwide had increased dramatically, both in Israel and the world.
A DDoS is short for Distributed denial of service attack and is a type of cyberattack that works by flooding a website with illegitimate traffic that overwhelms the servers and prevents legitimate users from accessing the website's services.
One way DDoS attacks can be prevented is through VPNs. They make it harder to track a network making it more difficult for a particular IP address to be targeted. Because of its efficacy, VPN is a popular and simple way to hide your IP address from would-be attackers. However, should an IP address already be known to a hacker, a VPN becomes ineffective. Given that cyberattacks rose 105% last year, prevention tactics such as VPNs are becoming all the more essential.
Despite being able to rectify the situation, the National Cyber Directorate could not identify the people behind the attack though Iran is an obvious suspect.