Unmasking Putin’s Schadenfreude and His Suspected Cyberwarfare

Amy Neustein

Bewilderment, angst and fear would grip an entire world on Oct. 7 as savagery and barbarism were unleashed by the Hamas terrorist group on the kibbutzim and towns in Israel along the Gazan border in the early morning hours of Simchas Torah and Shabbat.

Astonishingly, Israel, known for its superior reconnaissance and military savvy, was caught off guard; the consequences were verily catastrophic. Cybersecurity gaps may have contributed to this debacle.

Deputy Editor James Coker of Infosecurity Magazine reported last week that Radware, a publicly-traded cybersecurity company headquartered in Tel Aviv-Yafo with offices in Europe, Africa and Asia Pacific, found that Israel topped the list worldwide in its receipt of DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks just five days before the Hamas raid and in the days that followed. Such cyberattacks involve multiple connected online devices, collectively known as “botnet,” in which a targeted website is overwhelmed with fake traffic.

Coker stated Israel received 143 such DDoS attacks “making it the most targeted nation” in the world during that period. Radware found that more than a third of the claimed DDoS attacks were aimed at Israeli governmental agencies. Killnet, a pro-Russian (and purportedly Kremlin-associated) cybersecurity threat group that engaged in DDoS attacks targeting websites in countries that supported Ukraine following the Russian invasion, claimed several attacks on Israel’s cybersystem along with pro-Palestinian hacktivist groups.

Radware pointed to Killnet’s claim on Telegram Messenger, a cloud-based, cross platform instant messaging service, to targeting Israel’s banks and government sites that included Shabak.gov.il, Israel’s internal security service. The Jerusalem Post wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that it suffered downtime due to cyberattacks two days subsequent to the massacre.

Rob Joyce, director of cybersecurity at the National Security Agency, a national level intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, weighed in…