Israeli hospital targeted by cyber-attack from Iran and Hezbollah, Israel’s Cyber Directorate reveals
Attack was thwarted but some sensitive data was stolen
Iran and the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah attempted to disrupt the operation of Israel’s Ziv Medical Center in Safed three weeks ago, Israel’s National Cyber Directorate revealed on Monday.
A joint investigation by the National Cyber Directorate, the IDF, and Shin Bet internal agency found that AGRIUS, a hacker group affiliated with the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence, tried to hack into the hospital’s servers and interrupt its operations amid the ongoing war.
Ziv Medical Center is the largest Israeli hospital near the Lebanese border and treated many Israelis who were injured by Hezbollah’s almost-daily attacks since the start of the war on Oct. 7.
The hacker group also received assistance from Hezbollah’s ‘Lebanese Cedar’ cyber units under the leadership of Mohammad Ali Merhi.
The attack was thwarted in late November 2023, and while the hackers didn’t reach their intended goal, they did manage to steal sensitive data stored in the hospital's systems network. Medical treatment of the hospital's patients was not disrupted during the cyber-attack.
After the hackers published some of the stolen data online, the information was swiftly removed in a joint effort with the Israeli State Prosecutor's office to protect patients’ privacy.
In late October, the Israeli Health Ministry disconnected several hospitals from the remote internet due to a large number of cyber-attacks.
The Israeli National Cyber Directorate has affirmed that some of these attacks are caused by Hamas-affiliated cyber groups.
Since Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza began in early October, hundreds of Israeli sites and institutions have been targeted for cyber-attacks, many times by “hacktivists.”
Initially, those cyber-attacks targeted so-called “soft targets,” primarily media websites.
ALL ISRAEL NEWS was targeted by a cyber-attack called a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on Oct. 7, when we first began to cover the Hamas invasion and brutal massacre. Since then, the ALL ISRAEL NEWS website has been targeted multiple times.
Other media sites, like The Jerusalem Post, have also been the target of repeated attacks.
The All Israel News Staff is a team of journalists in Israel.
