Israeli Government Websites suffer from massive DDoS attack

A number of websites belonging to the Israeli government were knocked down in a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, rendering the portals inaccessible for a short period of time. The attack also disrupted non-governmental sites.

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is a malicious attempt to restrict the normal traffic of a targeted server or service by overwhelming the victim and its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of junk internet traffic by leveraging compromised computers and IoT devices as sources of attack traffic.

The Israel National Cyber Directorate (INCD) tweeted, “In the past few hours, a DDoS attack against a communications provider was identified. As a result, access to several websites, among them government websites, was denied for a short time. As of now, all of the websites have returned to normal activity.”

It is considered to be one of the largest cyber attacks launched against the Israeli government. The sites belonging to the health ministry, interior, justice, and welfare ministries got targeted. The attacker is not identified, but the hacker group Jerusalem Post took the blame for the DDoS attack that affected the bundle of government sites. However, it is believed that the attack was helped by a large organization or a state-backed threat actor.

This is not the first time DDoS attacks have been initiated against government IT infrastructure, with the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war paving the way for a series of "tit-for-tat" DDoS attack campaigns on both sides.

Besides, a vulnerability in Mitel MiCollab and MiVoice Business Express collaboration systems was recently weaponized to carry out sustained distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks for up to 14 hours with a record-breaking amplification ratio of 4.3 billion to 1.