Health Ministry Site Hit By Iranian Cyberattack

A group of hackers affiliated with Iran carried out a cyberattack on the website of the Health Ministry on Sunday, restricting access to the site from abroad.

Pro-Iranian group Al-Tahira claimed responsibility for the DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack, which disrupts a website’s normal traffic by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of internet traffic.

The ministry’s databases were not compromised and personal details were not accessed.

The same group claimed Thursday that it hacked the Yerushalayim municipality website and the website of state-owned Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. On Monday, the pro-Iranian group also made the Tel Aviv municipality site crash in the same way.

A message on the hacker group’s social media channel said: “The actions of Shahid Abu Sayif al-Gharawi have begun. The continued bombing of the Gaza Strip and the prevention of medicine shipments to the Palestinian territories, the economic siege of Iran, and the prevention of the arrival of treatments and COVID vaccines led to thousands of deaths, and now you stand against Russia for a Nazi capitalist regime in Ukraine. All of these will lead to your downfall. Now our focus is on you.”

Israel has been facing a growing number of attacks in the cyber realm in recent months.