"Cyberwar is happening as we speak. We haven’t seen the worst yet,” said former Israel National Cyber Directorate director Yigal Unna.
Ex-IDF Unit 8200 (Israel's NSA) chief and Team 8 Co-Founder Nadav Zafrir on Tuesday said that in a worst-case scenario, Russian hackers may try to block the West from extracting natural gas from access to the SWIFT banking system in response to sanctions against it.
Referring to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the spin-off conflict with the West in a speech at the Cybertech conference in Tel Aviv, Zafrir said, “We don’t know how this is going to unfold. We do know that the Russians probably have, excluding the West, the best cyber capabilities, defensive, but also offensive.”
Russia may say to itself, if you are sanctioning our economy, maybe “we, the Russians, can make sure you cannot extract your gas either. If we cannot use SWIFT, we can take you off your SWIFT system as well.”
Earlier, former Israel National Cyber Directorate (INCD) director Yigal Unna called Russian cyber attacks on Ukraine “frightening.” Unna said, “As we see what is happen now in central Europe, it is more than disturbing, it is frightening. Cyber war is happening as we speak. We haven’t seen the worst yet.”
Describing Russian cyber-attacks, he said “we are seeing ‘wipers’ [cyber attacks on websites], attacks against civilians, civilian entities and critical infrastructure, all the things we build and defend as nations.”
He warned that due to “war clouds and the fog of war…we still do not see all” of the consequences of Russian cyber attacks. Also at the conference, President Isaac Herzog complimented Israeli cyber companies for protecting millions around the world from cyber-attacks.
