Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Iran attempts cyber attacks on Israeli infrastructure “daily” only to be thwarted by the Jewish state.

“Iran attacks Israel on a daily basis,” he said at the Cybertech conference in Tel Aviv on Tuesday. “We monitor these attacks, see the attacks and thwart the attacks. In the last 24 hours, Iran has said it will destroy us and target our cities with missiles. They don’t impress us because we know our power in defense and offense.”
Netanyahu also touched on the vulnerability of airlines, saying they can be attacked in “one hundred [different] ways.”

Cyber attacks on aircraft can come via “ground control, interference, systems within the plane and communications. It is the most vulnerable system we have – dramatically vulnerable. But everything today is vulnerable and under attack.”

The prime minister also listed a range of statistics highlighting Israeli achievements in the cyber arena.

He said that all top global technology companies have major offices now in Israel, with some of those offices exceeding the size of their original headquarters in their home countries.

Netanyahu said that Israel’s strength comes from “leveraging our defense industry into the civilian cyber security sector.”

With 20% of the world’s investments in cyber security, Israel is now number two in the number of cyber security companies it hosts, Netanyahu added.

Another detail that Netanyahu added was that despite the fact that the US is 42 times larger than Israel, the US’s National Security Agency is less than 10 times bigger than Israel’s.

Finally, Netanyahu said that a key to rapid Israeli cyber growth is limiting regulation in order to avoid limits on creativity and international cooperation.

Source » jpost