Massive DDoS Attack Knocked Israeli Government Websites Offline

A number of websites belonging to the Israeli government were
felled in a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS^[1]) attack on Monday,
rendering the portals inaccessible for a short period of time.

“In the past few hours, a DDoS attack against a communications
provider was identified,” the Israel National Cyber Directorate
(INCD) said^[2]
in a tweet. “As a result, access to several websites, among them
government websites, was denied for a short time. As of now, all of
the websites have returned to normal activity.”

A distributed denial-of-service attack is a malicious attempt to
hamper the normal traffic of a targeted server or service by
overwhelming the victim and its surrounding infrastructure with a
flood of junk internet traffic by leveraging compromised computers
and IoT devices as sources of attack traffic.

The development comes after internet watchdog NetBlocks reported^[3]
“significant disruptions” registered on multiple networks supplied
by Israel’s telecom providers Bezeq and Cellcom.

The INCD has not pinned the attacks to a specific threat actor,
but Jerusalem Post alluded^[4]
to the possibility that the incident could have been the work of an
Iranian-affiliated hacker group in retaliation for alleged attempted sabotage^[5] of the nation’s Fordow nuclear enrichment^[6] plant.

This is not the first time DDoS attacks have been mounted
against government IT infrastructure, what with the ongoing
Russo-Ukrainian war paving the way for a series of “tit-for-tat”
DDoS attack campaigns^[7]
on both sides.

On top of that, a vulnerability in Mitel MiCollab and MiVoice
Business Express collaboration systems was recently weaponized^[8]
to carry out sustained distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks
for up to 14 hours with a record-breaking amplification ratio of
4.3 billion to 1.