Israel thwarts cyberattacks on Zelensky’s address to parliament
Spokesperson says 'Knesset’s information security unit thwarted the attempts'
Israel managed to halt a number of cyberattacks which intended to disrupt an address broadcast by Ukraine’s president to the state’s parliament on Sunday, the government said.
“The Knesset’s information security unit thwarted the attempts with assistance from the national cyber array,” a spokesperson for the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, said on Sunday.
The representative did not deliver additional information on the potential origin of the attacks.
Earlier in the day, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky delivered a speech via video to Israel’s lawmakers, and called on the country to issue greater support to Kyiv as it continues to battle a Russian invasion.
Zelensky’s remarks were additionally broadcast on a screen during a rally in support of Ukraine at Habima Square in Tel Aviv.
Though the threat actor behind the attempts to disrupt Zelensky’s speech was not immediately identified, Israel also recently suffered what its defense establishment called one of the country’s largest cyberattacks, according to Haaretz.
Last week a number of Israel’s government websites were impacted by a large-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack - a type of cyberattack in which malicious actors flood a system with requests in an attempt to overload it and disrupt services.
Though the DDoS assailant was not identified, past attacks on Israel’s digital infrastructure have been attributed to Iran.