Posted on July 6, 2023 at 6:39 PM

Israel And The UAE Worked Together To Mitigate Against A Major DDOS Attack

Israel helped the United Arab Emirates repel a major distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that happened earlier this year. DDoS campaigns have become quite prevalent over the past year, with the goal of the attackers behind such campaigns being to cripple systems by overloading them with traffic.

Israel helped the UAE repel a major DDoS attack

The head of cybersecurity for the UAE, Mohamed Al Kuwaiti, confirmed that such attacks have targeted the region. Al Kuwaiti said that cyberattacks usually come and go and even praised the Abraham Accords that were changed in 2022 to boost relations with the Middle East.

The cybersecurity professional noted that the partnership between Israel and the UAE had allowed the firm to improve the existing systems. It has also been able to create an early warning system that will be used to issue alerts in case threat actors are planning to launch hacking campaigns in the future.

The Jewish Press confirmed that the partnership between the two countries had indeed happened. One of the other people who participated at the conference was the director general of the Israel National Cyber Directorate, Gaby Portnoy.

Portnoy joined Al Kuwaiti at the conference alongside other cybersecurity professionals from Bahrain, Morocco, and the United States. According to Al Kuwaiti, the cybersecurity industry is an important sector for everyone. He noted that several startup companies across Israel were helping the UAE to build its presence in the cyber industry.

These Israeli startups were helping the UAE to create solutions in the cyber industry. The solutions offered by the company would also allow it to defend itself against cyberattacks. The partnership is strategic for the company as it comes at a time when countries are increasingly being targeted by hackers.

“Thank God for the Abraham Accords… Cybersecurity is an important aspect for us all. We in the UAE, for example, are going through a great digital transformation. A transformation across all sectors: aviation, education, healthcare, oil and gas, transportation. And, in fact, we need to do a safe and secure transformation,” Al Kuwaiti said in a report by All Israel.

Increased cooperation between Israel and the UAE

The admission of this DDoS campaign by Al Kuwaiti comes during the same week as a formal announcement was made by the company on boosting the cooperation between Israel and the UAE. The announcement focused on ways to increase intelligence sharing between the two countries through the Crystal Ball project.

The partnership in question will focus not only on Israel and the UAE but also on private industry. The goal of the Crystal Ball project is to identify and repel hacking campaigns. Such moves are enabled through partnerships and knowledge sharing around the cyber threats that happen at the national level.

Analysts have pointed to the increased threat posed by criminal groups that work together to target individuals and companies. Such groups have now shifted their attention toward government agencies. Because of this growing threat, there was a need to make improvements in international cooperation between countries to address the threat.

The UAE is not the only one that is being targeted by cyberattacks. During the CyberWeek, Portnoy addressed the growing risk posed by cyberattacks saying that a hacker group known as MuddyWater had launched hacking exploits against Israel.

At the time, Portnoy said that this threat actor group had links to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). He blamed this group for being behind a hacking campaign that targeted the Technion Institute of Technology in Haifa.

Technion was forced to disconnect the systems at the institution to ensure that the hacker group did not cause significant security damage and guarantee that users did not lose their data.

A blog published by Simon Kenin from Deep Instinct said that a tailored command and control server had been detected during the hacking campaign conducted against Technion. The MuddyWater hacker group has been using the compromised server since 202 to conduct its hacking attacks.

Portnoy said that this hacker group does not only target Israel in its hacking campaigns. Instead, it also has civilian targets across many countries, such as Egypt, India, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Turkey, and others.

The MuddyWater hacker group has a history of launching major hacking attacks in the Middle East. This group has been found to be conducting spear phishing campaigns against the employees of telecom operators in the Middle East. The group has also been linked to a wide range of cyber surveillance activities.