Israeli cyberhotline offers help for the hacked

Israel has launched a cyberhotline, staffed mostly by veterans of military computing units, to enable businesses and private individuals to report suspected hacking and receive realtime solutions. The 119 call-in number to the Computer Emergency Response Center (CERT) is being billed by Israel and cyber experts as a world first. “Our job is to mitigate the damage as quickly as possible, to learn about the threats and to spread the knowledge where relevant,” CERT director Lavy Shtokhamer told Reuters. At the center, 20 responder terminals face a bank of huge screens, one of which shows a world mapwith cyberattacks rendered as meteor-like strikes on Israel and the country of origin of computer servers used by the hackers.