Israeli cyber-hotline offers help for the hacked

BEERSHEBA, Israel (Reuters) - Israel has launched a cyber hotline, staffed mostly by veterans of military computing units, to enable businesses and private individuals to report suspected hacking and receive real-time solutions.

The 119 call-in number to the Computer Emergency Response Centre (CERT) is being billed by Israel and cyber experts as a world first.

“Our job is to mitigate the damage as quickly as possible, to learn about the threats and to spread the knowledge where relevant,” CERT director Lavy Shtokhamer told Reuters at the facility in the southern hi-tech hub city of Beersheba.

“A cyber-attack may not be limited only to property or financial damage. It can also threaten lives.”

In some cases, Shtokhamer said, CERT will dispatch teams of experts to affected computer users at a few hours’ notice.

At the center, 20 responder terminals face a bank of huge screens, one of which shows a world map with cyber-attacks rendered as meteor-like strikes on Israel and the country of origin of computer servers used by the hackers.

When Reuters viewed the facility, these were in the northeastern United States, western Europe and Indonesia - details Shtokhamer played down given hackers’ use of proxy servers to mask their true locations.

He declined to elaborate on this. Ahead of Israel’s April 9 election, its officials have been reticent about the possibility of online influence campaigns of the kind Russia has been accused of waging in the West, or about Chinese cyber-espionage.

Israeli cyber expertise is also widely believed to have been used in sabotage against Iran’s nuclear program and controversial surveillance software made available to foreign clients.

Lavy Shtokhamer, director of Israel's Computer Emergency Response Centre (CERT) stands in front of screens displaying a world map and other data as employees work at a cyber hotline facility in Beersheba, southern Israel February 14, 2019. REUTERS/Amir Cohen