Iranian threat actors have published sensitive files with private information belonging to hundreds of Israeli soldiers.
Reportedly, the files were leaked by a cybercriminal group called “Moses Staff” and have been found to contain the details of Israel Defence Forces (IDF) troops and personnel.
Specific reports indicate that some of the information that was accessed and leaked by the hackers include the details of deployment of an IDF combat brigade – including job descriptions, a list of soldier names, email addresses, cellphone numbers and the home addresses of soldiers under the combat brigade.
Even more, images of the Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz are said to be among the small trove of information that was harvested and leaked by the Iranian threat actors. The cybercriminals turned up the heat by claiming that they are surveying the top government official of one of the world’s most advanced militaries. This is in addition to their claims that they succeeded to breach more than 165 servers and 254 websites in compiling more than 11TB of soldier data.
It turns out that a 2010 letter addressed by the Defense Minister to the Jordanian Army’s Deputy Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and head of intelligence was among the data that was stolen by the hacker group. This also included sensitive Excel files with information concerning the socioeconomic status of Israeli troops.
According to an article by Jerusalem Post, Moses Staff posted on their website that they are targeting the same individuals that did not “tolerate” the legitimacy of Moses, which may provide an explanation to why the group chose to adopt a rather unique name.
Still on their online platform, the hacker group has reportedly asserted that it will not forget “the soldiers whose blood is shed due to wrong policies and fruitless wars, the mothers mourning for their children, and all the cruelty and injustice were done to the people of this nation.’
Ynet reports that the Israel National Cyber Directorate responded to the events by asking organizations to implement the latest critical updates released by Microsoft as threat actors were exploiting the currently-existing security shortcomings in a number of organizations.
Israel Was the Country Most Targeted by Ransomware in 2020
A recent cybersecurity report by Check Point researchers indicated that Israeli institutions are subjected to twice as many cyberattacks as counterpart organizations in other countries across the globe.
On average, one out of every sixty Israeli organizations or companies is attacked every week by threat actors leveraging on ransomware tools. It turns out that this frequency has increased by a 30 percent margin when compared to 2020 figures.
In particular, the firm’s report indicated that the Israeli health sector was the most affected by threat actors looking to breach critical government services – it is estimated that the country’s health sector sustains an average of 1,443 cyberattacks every week.
Similarly, the Check Point researchers revealed that other destinations across the world had their health and educational sectors accounting for the highest number of attacks. This was followed by government entities and security companies.
Separate cybersecurity findings indicated that GandCrab ransomware ranked first in the list of Top 10 most active ransomware families in Q1 2020 (See chart).
Figure 1: Chart showing the Top 10 most active ransomware families since Q1 2020 (Source: VirusTotal).
