14 DAY TRIAL // The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have conducted military operations since 1948. Now, the IDF says that it’s preparing to defend the country’s cyberspace against hackers.
The battle against cyber adversaries is coordinated from the IDF’s Teleprocessing Corps. Here, the Lotem-C4i Technological Division is responsible with cyber defenses and the development of new technologies.
This unit is said to be one of the largest security organizations in Israel, housing thousands of experts in engineering IT and mathematics. Each of the soldiers who come to work here take a three-month course in cyber security.
“We look at the technologies that are available and try to imagine scenarios where they would be useful, Other times we take the opposite approach and look at the problems we face and try to create technologies to solve them,” Lieutenant Colonel Eric, Lotem’s CTO, noted.
The IDF says that it takes cyber security very seriously since it has become dependent on computer systems in both day-to-day operations and emergency situations. The C4i Technological Division is particularly critical.
“If our system goes down, the army has a big problem,” noted Brigadier General Eyal Zelinger, commander of the C4i Technological Division.
Currently, the IDF has a Cyber Defense Division that deals with cyber threats 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Furthermore, each section of the army has been assigned a cyber-defense officer.
In May 2013, the Israeli military acquired two large software companies. These firms started in the IDF, but at some point, they left the military. After reacquiring them, the IDF combined them into a new unit called Matzpan, a Hebrew acronym for Army Command, Control and Management Systems.
In the past months, Israel was targeted several times, including by hacktivists who launched a number of campaigns. However, none of the hacktivist operations launched so far appear to have caused any real damage.