The Jerusalem Post was only the first of many newly hacked victims that cyberwarfare will claim in 2022, as threats from China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and others go into overdrive.
Yes, the US is the world’s greatest superpower, and aspects of Israel’s cyber power leave it rated between third to fifth after China and Russia and interchangeable with England depending on the issue.
But there are two problems that leave the US and Israel hopelessly outmatched.
The first is that cyber offense always beats cyber defense, and the second is that in some asymmetric matchups, Washington and Jerusalem are like communities in glass houses fighting adversaries in mud huts.
Cyber offense always beats cyber defense because any wall or defense, physical or digital, has vulnerabilities. Give an adversary unlimited time and resources, and eventually they will find and exploit those vulnerabilities.
Sometimes those vulnerabilities will be part of the digital infrastructure and defense itself, and sometimes they will be a single employee who foolishly clicks on a link that they thought their colleague or aunt (cleverly impersonated using social engineering and data mining) sent them.
The glass houses and mud huts analogy was recently put forth by Kevin Mandia, CEO of cybersecurity firm Mandiant, which first uncovered Moscow’s mega SolarWinds supply-chain hack of almost the entire US government and wide swaths of the global economy.
Without putting down US and Israeli adversaries, and with the point is that the quality of life and reliance on technology being is so much higher in the US and Israel, we all just have far more to lose.
Furthermore, it is no longer only China and Russia that have cyber weapons that are virtually unstoppable when used on a focused narrow target. Tehran now also has some of these cyber weapons and is constantly updating its malware products in a systemic and relentless manner.
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