Palestinians might carry out cyberattacks in response to annexation

While it’s not the number one threat, former Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin warns that it’s one the defense establishment should prepare for

Palestinians might try to carry out cyberattacks against Israeli targets should the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu follow through on its plans to annex the West Bank and Jordan Valley.

While it’s not the number one threat, Yuval Diskin, the former head of Israel’s Shin Bet internal security agency warned that it’s a threat that the defense establishment should prepare for.

“Israel is very familiar with cyber threats coming from the Palestinian arena, mostly from Gaza by groups like Hamas, which are trying to collect intelligence inside Israel and carry out attacks,” he said. “While it’s not exceptional and not the number one threat, it remains a threat.”

He made the remarks as cybersecurity start-up Opora, which he founded, announced that it had secured $7 million in seed funding from Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP) and private angel investors.

Diskin partnered with former Shin Bet officials Noam Jolles and Tsafrir Katz, along with San Francisco-based CEO and cybersecurity entrepreneur Chris Bell, to launch Opora in 2018. The company has been operating in stealth mode since then, raising $2m. in capital last year through a private investor and testing its technology with customers in Europe and the United States.

According to the company, its “Adversary Threat Protection” (ATP) platform provides a “realtime and continuous view of customers’ cyber adversaries, exposing and monitoring their network of attack infrastructure, and delivering preemptive action to prevent attacks at the source.”

Promising an “adversary firewall” by preemptively blocking attacks days in advance of a campaign or throughout the attack chain, the approach is said to have been conceived by Diskin while at the Shin Bet to preemptively foil terror attacks.

“Israel has brought the three big cyber paradigms to the world,” said JVP founder & chairman Erel Margalit, commenting on the investment.

“The first [was] firewalls created by Checkpoint Software; the second being Cyberark’s solution – preventing attackers from within – and now the third: Opora’s technology is stopping criminals on their home turf before they even attack.”

Opora’s approach, Diskin said, came from Israel’s history in coping with many terror attacks over the years.

“Israel is a small country and time is everything. If I want to stop or prevent an attack, I need to have very good intelligence and bring warfare to the side of the adversary,” he said, adding that “cyber is only a medium, but at the end of the day, cyber attackers are humans and make mistakes – and if you are in the right place you can get them.”