Israel’s National Authority of Cyber Defense has made it official on Wednesday saying that it thwarted a large-scale cyber attack originating from foreign nation targeting over 120 Israel organizations.
The Cyber Defense authority of Israel added in its media briefing that the attacks were launched between April 19th to April 23rd and came in the form of phishing attacks originating from servers related to educational institutions and private entities.
As per our sources, it was a bug vulnerability which exposed the servers to malware attacks launched by a group of hackers from a foreign nation. And for obvious reasons, the country’s political spokesman wanted to keep the attacking nation’s identity under wraps.
The bug CVE-2017-0199 is used to exploit the weaknesses in Microsoft systems- especially Microsoft Word. This vulnerability was first revealed to the world by a hackers group called Shadow Brokers.
FYI, Shadow Brokers is the same hacking group which exposed documents related to the hacking tools of NSA targeting Windows systems. And as per the details available from Kaspersky, over 5 million machines using windows OS are vulnerable to the malware called Double Pulsar which originated from a leaked program of Shadow Brokers; and developed by NSA’s cyber sleuths.
Hackers wanted to use this malware to infect Israel computer networks to steal info. But the National Authority for Cyber Security detected this cyber threat in time and succeeded in thwarting it.
NOTE- It has to be notified over here that in recent years, Israel has evolved as a technology nurturing nation to a number of world-renowned cyber security startups.
So, it’s really disappointing to learn that the technology-rich nation has become the latest victim of cyber attacks launched by state-sponsored actors.
