*Amazing but typical of Israeli intelligence that they would baldly discuss "existent cyberwar" and even name-check Stuxnet without ever mentioning their own stellar role in these escalations.
http://www.technologyreview.com/web/37832/?nlid=4602&a=f
(...)
"Last year, it was discovered that cyber warfare had broken new ground with the Stuxnet worm attack, which targeted the control systems of nuclear plants. The U.S. and Israel have been accused of designing the worm, which disabled the Iranian nuclear plant at Natanz by causing extreme temperature variations, and which went undetected for months, perhaps years. Several speakers at the conference referred to Stuxnet as a game changer because it brought cyber warfare into the realm of offensive acts against critical infrastructure. But there was no public acknowledgement or even hint that Israel was indeed responsible for the worm. (((What do the private acknowledgements sound like, one wonders. Obviously they didn't call it "Stuxnet." What IS its real name? "Nuclear Sabotage Software Thingy Number 3A"?)))
"Instead, discussion focused on the country's defense against cyber attack.
"Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the conference, "The more computerized we get, the more vulnerable we become. There is therefore no choice but to deal with this in a more systematic and focused manner."
(((He says that about every conceivable threat, including American diplomatic initiatives and boatloads of unarmed Euro peaceniks.)))
"The outgoing Shin Bet chief, Yuval Diskin, blamed China for some recent computer security breaches around the world and said the Chinese government's cyber command now comprises "the largest number of hackers on earth." He said there was evidence that on April 8, 2010, China diverted 15 percent of U.S. Internet traffic through its routers. (He was referring to an incident described in the report of the Congressional U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission released last November. The attack lasted for 18 minutes and appears to have been a case of IP hijacking or BGP hijacking—the takeover of whole blocks of website addresses by corrupting Internet network routing.) Cyber warfare is already "an existing reality," he said.
(((Kind of him to take the trouble to point this out to the remaining doubters. Next time some hacksymp alleges that cyberwar doesn't exist, you can point out that "former head of the Shin Bet, Yuval Diskin, disagrees with you.")))
"Diskin asserted that Israeli networks critical to cell-phone communications, transport systems, finance, and the supply of electricity and water are all wide open to attack, and that this constitutes "a major threat to national security" because Israel, like all modern states, relies heavily on such systems to function normally...."
