A senior cyber intelligence official reveals: 'Hospitals are much easier to blackmail'

The Ministry of Health and the National Cyber Directorate were informed on Tuesday night about a serious cyber attack that hit the Me'ani Hayeshua Medical Center - and caused the administrative computer systems to be shut down.

Nitzan Amar, the deputy head of the National Cyber Directorate, spoke with Anat Davidov on her program on 103FM about the disturbing incident.

"The attack caused the computer systems to be shut down. The medical equipment was not damaged. The hospital with the National Cyber Command and teams from the Ministry of Health are helping to handle the incident, and the incident is currently contained. We are on the ground and our main mission is to restore the hospital to capacity. The incident is currently under investigation. Restoring an organization and certainly a hospital to capacity is a matter of weeks."

He described the sensitive situation: "In the end, because of the essential services it provides, there are many unscrupulous hackers who take advantage of the fact that the service is very essential in hospitals and can exploit a ransom demand from an organization that is supposed to save lives. They exploit this weakness because there is also a lot of personal information, and such organizations are much easier to blackmail."

Are there any clues as to where exactly the attack is headed?

"Right now we understand that this is an attack that probably has a criminal background, but we are still in the midst of the investigation. As soon as we know the exact details, we will come out and publish it."

Amar spoke about the hacking attempts that occur routinely: "There are attempts in Israel every day, we experience about two hundred incidents a year in all sectors. But there are attempts in many sectors, including the health sector, every day that are stopped by defense systems.

"We have been in an investment program since the 'Hillel Yaffe' event. We are making a great effort to increase resilience in hospitals. We are mapping, scanning all hospitals and essential organizations in the economy. Usually it is an exploitation of weakness, looking at the network from the outside, we are dealing with it. Awareness has grown greatly, there is good cooperation, and we are also achieving successes every day in curbing difficult events."