Israel might be a small country in practical, but it has emerged as a cyber superpower in recent times said David H Petraeus, the former Director of CIA, United States. The words were spoken by the respected gentleman at the CyberTech TLV 2018 conference, also known as Tel Aviv Conference held at Tel Aviv Convention Center, Israel.
Speaking at the event which was attended by more than 150,000 technologists from more than 80 countries Petraeus added that the collaboration with Israel has worked wonders for the US as both sides have benefitted in furnishing effective ways to cope with the increasing threats in cyber landscape.
Readers of Cybersecurity Insiders should notify a fact that Petraeus spoke these words by putting all his past statements on the back burner- in relation to Iran’s nuclear program in 2010 with Stuxnet virus.
Sitting alongside Brig Gen Nadav Zafrir, David H Petraeus said that some state-funded actors are indeed having nasty intentions of attacking critical infrastructures like water supplies, oil refineries, telecommunications and transportation systems. But United States cyber army is said to be capable enough to thwart such attacks with immense valiance.
Nadav Zafrir agreed with the words of Patreus and added that another area for worry is data protection. Referring to the Russian interference and influence in the 2016 US Presidential elections.
Zafrir echoed the sentiment, saying the threat scale is expanding as the world is showing a lot of interest in staying connected (web) which enhances the hackers’ capacity to many folds.
Tel Aviv conference which is being held between January 29th to January 31st at the Tel Aviv Exhibition Grounds is said to have attracted over 150 speakers from across many sub-sectors of cybersecurity ecosystem- including Israel Police Cyber Unit, the Mossad, and the Shabak, Israel’s Internal Security Agency(ISA).
According to a report released by Start-up Nation Central, there are around 420 active cybersecurity companies operating in Israel. Among them, more than half of them are working with the government of United States in defending the nations critical infra against cyber attacks.
Thus, Israel truly deserves the status of ‘cyber superpower’…….isn’t?
