Israel’s cybersecurity firms protect everyone

The same antisemites condemning the state of Israel instead ought to be thanking the Jewish state for keeping them, their banks, their credit card issuers, and everyone they’ve ever known safe from cyberattacks.

As the multibillion-dollar North Korean hacking of Binance makes clear, in cyberspace, no one is safe. Individuals, terrorist groups, criminal gangs, and state actors, including Russia, China, and North Korea, are constantly at work. They’re hacking into every imaginable system online to steal money and information and to terrorize governments and businesses.

Just last week, someone, most likely Russia, hacked into supermarket refrigeration systems across Europe, causing tens of thousands of dollars of food to go bad and unleashing dozens of bomb threats against European airlines, fomenting disruption across the system. Just to show they can.

Only one country leads the world in stopping cybercrime: Israel.

Fifteen years ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recognized that cyberspace would be the next great theater of war and that a small country like Israel would be exceptionally vulnerable to attack.

So he conceived the notion of a nationwide alliance of government, the military, intelligence community, the private sector, and universities to combat threats in cyberspace.

The Israeli government created a directorate for cybersecurity to develop new cyber warfare protection technology. The government also put tens of millions of dollars into venture funds focused on cyberspace protection startups.

The cybersecurity directorate designated each major university in Israel to specialize in a particular aspect of the field, building a deep bench of young cybertech experts and researchers.

Israel happens to know a little something about creating new tech companies. The Jewish state is known as “startup nation” because of its ability to launch super successful high tech firms at a rate that far outstrips its relatively minuscule population.

A large number of Israel’s tech founders are veterans of the IDF Unit 8200, the elite technology force. In a small country like Israel, everybody knows everybody, and Unit 8200 is the ultimate tech incubator. It’s almost as if the whole country were one big Silicon Valley. Given Israel’s massive success in tech, when Netanyahu decreed that Israel would take the lead in cybersecurity, it was only a matter of time before his vision became reality.

In just a few short years, Israeli cybersecurity startups have been gobbled up by Microsoft, Sequoia Partners, and Japan’s SoftBank to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. The result: a safer world, where bad actors, whether in Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang, or the building next door to yours, find their hopes of disrupting society or stealing money thwarted.

Israel’s cybersecurity systems have led to partnerships with nations around the world as small as the Czech Republic and as large as the United Kingdom. Everyone with any knowledge of cyber warfare knows that Israel, a country of just 10 million, leads the world in cybersecurity.

BIBI QUITS! YOUR CLIP-AND-SAVE GUIDE TO THE ISRAELI ELECTION

So the world’s antisemites, anti-Zionists, and Israel haters can sleep well, knowing that their assets, their credit cards, their governments, and their way of life, including their freedom to hate Jews, are protected … by the very country they despise.

Funny world, isn’t it? Shalom from Israel!

Michael Levin is a two-time New York Times bestselling author. His next novel, 2028, A Political Thriller, will be published by Morgan James in April.

Continue reading...

[ H/T Washington Examiner ]