Tag Archive for: Israel’s

Israel’s digital quality of life plummets to 17th place globally, no longer world lea


The collapse in internet affordability in Israel has seen it not only lose its spot as a leader in digital quality of life, but fall a whopping 16 places to settle as 17th globally, according to Surfshark’s 5th annual Digital Quality of Life Index (DQL). The index is scored by taking into account five core pillars – Internet Quality, E-Security, E-Government, Internet Affordability, and E-Infrastruure.

The fall in ranking can be misleading as four of the five pillars either kept or improved their ranking from last year – it is Israel’s collapse in Internet Affordability (from 1st to 21st) that most affected the country’s overall score. Its worst performing pillar, E-Security (32nd), which measures how well a country is prepared to counter cybercrime and the quality of a country’s data protection laws, remained the same. Its Electronic Govenment ranking jumped from 33rd to 18th, its Electronic Infrastrure score rose from 28th to 21st, and its overall Internet Quality jumped from 21st to 17th.

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Israel’s collapse can be credited to its plummet in Internet affordability compared to other countries.

(Credit: Shutterstock )


Globally, fixed internet and mobile internet are 11% and 26% more affordable than 2022, and Israel’s unallginment with global rates is likely the cause for its drop in this pillar – contributing to its overall collapse.

“In many nations, ‘digital quality of life’ has merged into the broader concept of overall ‘quality of life’. There’s no other way to look at it now that so many daily activities, including work, education, and leisure, are done online,” said Gabriele Racaityte-Krasauske, Surfshark’s spokeswoman. “That’s why it’s crucial to pinpoint the areas in which a nation’s digital quality of life thrives and where attention is needed, which is the precise purpose of the DQL Index.”


In 2023, Israel remains above Turkey (55th) and Saudi Arabia (45th) in Digital Quality of Life, and its Internet Quality remains 34% higher than the global average. Compared to other countries in this pillar, Israel is prepared to fight against cybercrime relatively well, and the country has good data protection laws compared to other nations…

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‘Our Conflict With Iran Is Unparalleled’, Say Israel’s Elite Cyber Unit Commanders – Israel News


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Inside Israel’s Cyber War Industry


Five years ago, in 2016, Ahmed Mansoor, a human rights activist in the United Arab Emirates, received what has been called the most famous text message in the world. Mansoor received two SMS text messages on his iPhone promising “new secrets” about detainees tortured in UAE jails if he clicked on an included link. Suspecting something was amiss, Mansoor sent the messages to Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto, who analyzed the link and pointed to Pegasus, NSO’s flagship product.

The same software was reportedly used to spy on a number of Indian politicians, activists and journalists, with the Pegasus scandal dominating headlines recently.

A lot has changed at NSO since the attack on Mansoor in 2016. At the time, the company was owned by the American private equity firm Francisco Partners, which had bought it for around $100 million in 2014. The company had a strict no-press policy. Just a few years later in 2019, NSO sold for $1 billion to the European private equity firm Novalpina and the original founders.

The massive jump in valuation reflects the rapid growth of the spyware industry – made possible by technology improvements, including so called “zero click” techniques that infect targets without the need for any action at all. Mansoor had to click on a link for the spyware to run on his phone. That’s no longer the case, as the spyware uses sophisticated techniques that keep its activities as unobtrusive as possible – and runs on your devices with no action on your part.

With growth comes increased secrecy. Israeli cyberwar firms are notoriously secretive. So secretive that we truly do not know the scale of the industry. “We can only guess at scale. We only know some players. The market is growing, but we lack a lot of information about abuses,” John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, told Technology Review.

The techniques and indicators investigators used to detect and analyse spyware are becoming more difficult to spot. And as a result, it is becoming increasingly difficult to hold these firms accountable when privacy violations and human rights abuses occur.

The spyware firms say their technology is crucial in…

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Israel’s Version of Moving Fast and Breaking Things: The New Cybersecurity Bill


The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) of Israel published a new bill in February entitled “Cybersecurity and the National Cyber Directorate.” If passed by government committee and the Knesset, this law will redefine cybersecurity governance in Israel. The PMO officially tabled an earlier version of the bill in June 2018, but that bill did not advance through the legislative process given the strong objections it raised both in the professional cybersecurity community and among other government authorities. In particular, stakeholders raised concerns about the broad scope of authority sought by the Israel National Cyber Directorate (INCD) under the 2018 bill. Other concerns included the lack of proper safeguards over the nature and scope of invasive “computer protection actions” taken by the INCD in response to cyberattacks, the potential for privacy infringements in the name of national security, and the interface between the activities of the INCD and other law enforcement agencies. The process of affording the INCD—which is currently a policy-setting body—with operative powers has been controversial even within Israel’s security establishment. One publicized example of this controversy was a 2017 leaked memo to the prime minister from the Mossad, the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet), Israel Defense Forces and the Defense Ministry declaring their opposition to the expanding authorities of the INCD.

The new bill is an abbreviated formulation of the 2018 version and is framed as temporary legislation with a two-year sunset clause—perhaps to avoid some of the opposition that emerged in response to its earlier iteration. The PMO wants to move fast—somewhat insincerely in our view—because of increased cybersecurity risk while teleworking during the coronavirus pandemic and the associated digitization of workplaces in both the public and private sectors. A string of recent attacks on Israeli companies, which two of the authors discussed in a previous Lawfare post, also generated a sense of urgency for providing the INCD with unprecedented and controversial legal tools to respond to the new risk environment. These steps, however, come at the risk of compromising…

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