The Startup Nation: Inside Israel's Cybersecurity Revolution - From Military to Global Leader

Cyberattacks on modern cars demonstrate hacking vulnerabilities, potentially causing physical harm.

### The Rise of Cyber Warfare: Israel's Role in Global Cybersecurity Innovation
* 🚗 In an underground car park near Tel Aviv, a demonstration reveals how **easily a cyberattack can be launched** on modern vehicles, highlighting the **vulnerability of connected cars**.
* 🔧 Using a wireless adapter, the hacker manipulates various functions of the car, including **windows and speed**, showcasing the **potential for physical harm** through hacking.
* 🌍 Israel is recognized as a **global leader in cybersecurity**, with around **20% of the world's private investment** in this field concentrated in the country, driven by its military's expertise.
* 💡 The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) play a crucial role in this innovation, with many soldiers transitioning into the tech industry, creating **successful startups post-military service**.
* 🛡 The military's cyber units, like Unit 8200, have been pivotal in developing **advanced cyber capabilities**, even executing significant operations like the **Stuxnet attack** on Iran's nuclear program.
* 📚 Educational initiatives for high school students are fostering future talent for the IDF's cyber divisions, ensuring a **continuous pipeline of skilled individuals**.
* ⚠ The risks of cyber warfare extend beyond data breaches; critical infrastructure, such as **energy and healthcare systems**, is increasingly vulnerable to attacks that could have **life-threatening consequences**.
* 🔍 As cyber warfare evolves, the potential to **manipulate public perception** poses a significant threat to democracies, with countries like **Russia and China** leading aggressive cyber operations against others.

We've come to an underground car park just outside Tel Aviv to meet someone who's going to show us how easy it is to launch a cyberattack on almost any modern car. Just like any connected computer, everything that you connect to the internet is vulnerable.

So this is true. The same way two parts Zip is using a wireless adapter that enables internet access to hack into the car's Wi-Fi, which is now standard on new vehicles. What's weird about this little experiment we're doing is that I've got no idea what it is that he's going to be trying.

So we're going to start small, playing a bit with the windows, then putting the windows up and down. Let's play a bit with the blinkers. See, the left indicator's going on, the right indicator's coming on. So now he's messing with the miles-per-hour.

It's gone all the way up to 220 kilometers an hour. The rev limiter's going all over the place. This would freak you out if you didn't know it was being done on purpose. And now it's completely disabled, engine malfunction. The fact that he can do all of this means that he could very easily just ram this straight into that wall in front of us.

That experience, the experiment that we just did, it's probably the first time where I've thought hacking could physically cause harm to me. How many cars in the world do you think you could do the same thing to right now, today? I would say that most of them are vulnerable or susceptible to hacker attacks.

Though there aren't any cars made in Israel, the world's top auto security companies are Israeli, and they're all part of a wave of cyber innovation that's sweeping across the country. Israel has become a world leader in cyber technology, and all of the Israeli companies who are at the forefront of that revolution are inside this building.

There are over 10,000 people here from all over the world, and what many of them have come here to hear is Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, laying out what this country is, a global leader in a field. A few years ago, I set the goal for Israel in becoming one of the top 5 cybersecurity powers in the world.

It's a goal we've met. Today, roughly one-fifth of the world's global private investment in cybersecurity is here. You're in a wonderful business. It's endless. In fact, Israel receives more venture capital funds per person than any other country in the world.

It has become known as the startup nation. To understand how Israel became a global leader in this field, we spoke with Israeli journalist and senior defense correspondent, Alain Ben David. Israel has a very small community. There is practically an island. You're completely surrounded with nations that you cannot cross to.

Israel developed creativity to compensate for its lack of resources. And it is a country that needs to conduct constant surveillance on its neighbors. As a country which is under constant threat of annihilation by other nations, Israel understood many years ago that going into wars and launching massive military

operations bears almost unbearable prices, first in human lives, and in terms of economic costs, in terms of international legitimacy. So, cyber was the right answer for many things that Israel needed to do. Do you think Israel's private cybersecurity industry is essentially the child of

the Israeli military's affairs? Oh, absolutely. The whole of this cyber industry relies on knowledge gathered by people serving in Israel's different security agencies in the military. Military service is mandatory for most Israeli citizens. And one of the largest parts of the Israeli Defense Force is its cyber and intelligence units. These entire units, and some

20,000 cyber soldiers are now being relocated to Be'er Sheva, a desert city which is quickly becoming Israel's Silicon Valley. This military-industrial cyber complex is said to be the largest infrastructure project in Israel's history. We spoke with the CEO behind this five billion dollar undertaking, Ronny Zarom.

What's the significance of the military being a part of all of this? Because going to the service is compulsory, you can look at the Israeli army as the largest HR organization in the world. Because, practically speaking, they start scanning the layers of the Israeli population

and position and divide people in the right places, especially in elite units. So if you think about it, you take somebody who is 18 years of age and you get them exposed to the state-of-the-art technology, to the highly advanced paradigms and methodologies. So when they go out of the service at the age of 23,

24, from an IBM point of view, or from an EMC point of view, or from an Intel point of view, somebody has effectively already conducted the screening and already selected the best that can get in, in that sense. But the initial screening and recruitment process for the IDF's most elite cyber units actually begins much earlier.

In 2013, the Ministry of Defence helped create a national program for high school students interested in learning more about the realm of cyber. These after-school classes have become unofficial feeder programs for the IDF cyber units. We met with a recruiter for one of those units, C4I, who could not reveal her identity

because of her security clearance. [Hebrew speech -  sounds like:  Ma'am, DJ Ali, Mr. Shah, pneumococcus. It's been robots, know in Keynesian, a bill among vishal banana oil shares remedy now. Reading show officially, we speak has officially... 20 me to get him to forgive me, my disciple.]

The Kahana home. Anonymity didn't even... Bill, tell them the movie much. I'm going to... you know that all of it are different. But there does seem to be some that stick out in the hierarchy. So, for example, 1801. I'm a dime. For decades, Unit 8200 was a closely guarded secret.

partially because this elite cyber and intelligence division doesn't just provide defense. In fact, they're responsible for one of the most aggressive cyber attacks in history: Stuxnet, a cyber attack that sabotaged the Iranian nuclear program by destroying centrifuges at the Natanz nuclear

facility. It is widely believed to be a joint operation of Unit 8200 and the NSA. And in 2014, forty-three former members of 8200 wrote an open letter to the prime minister, refusing to serve because of the unit's widespread use of surveillance.

We met with one of the soldiers who signed the letter. Israeli intelligence is everywhere, literally everywhere in the Palestinian territories. It doesn't matter whether they're suspect of something or not, whether they're political activists, they're whatever. No one's off-limits. What's wrong with that if you're at war with another people? You've got complete surveillance.

Sounds like quite an advantage. The problem is when it goes beyond insecurity. If someone is about to do an attack in Tel Aviv, then I could see why we'd want to know where he is or where he's going. But if you've got his brother, his sister,

his cousin, his cousin's friends, all of them tapped as well, then that's where it clearly crosses the line. She'd find out that someone might be having an affair, someone is gay. When you come across that information, instead of it being put away as irrelevant, it's something that you would send forward, and it would be used. If someone's cheating on their wife, and...

The United Students of [unclear] discovered this. What's the benefit of having that information? Israel can approach them and get them to cooperate one way or another, be it get some information, go photograph some places. And what they get out of it is their secret; it has not been revealed publicly.

Yeah, you can call it blackmail. Despite its shadowy reputation, one thing is clear: the skills and methods Sayeret Matkal soldiers learned were extremely profitable on the free market. These veterans have gone on to create tech startups worth billions of dollars, and the most prestigious tech companies

actively recruit former Unit 8200 members. Charan Nirmirovsky served in one of the IDF's technological units before founding a company called Inver Limited. Companies hire his team to attack their systems to assess and then fix any weaknesses. So at the moment, around this table, your colleagues here are

actually attacking, they're actually attacking a company. These days it only takes an email to control you. I can send you a PDF file, and when you open it, you get a hostile file installed on your computer. After you get it, everything you stroke on your keyboard is being transferred to the internet: every password, every credit card number, every email you send.

Now, what do you do with that data after you collect it? You sell it. You sell it on the darknet. Everything you want to know you can buy here: business profiles, social security numbers of the employees, dates of birth. Wrongs Hospital in New York, they stole 34,000 patient records.

Healthcare will be the most profitable information today. What's this? That's an email from Senator McCain? John McCain's emails floating around, Governor. While the origin of Senator McCain's emails remains uncertain, the power of hacked emails and data breaches became abundantly clear during the 2016 election, President Obama blaming Russia.

For interfering in the U.S. elections. Beyond the risks of data breaches and hacker markets, potential threats to critical infrastructure, including physical facilities, are also becoming indisputable. We met up with Barrett Pearlman, an age 200 vet and founder of energy, a start-up to build cybersecurity

networks for industrial facilities that could be vulnerable to, you know, what's happened in the last decade or so is the interconnectivity between these systems. I want to access anytime, anywhere, to any place. Quite convenient and very convenient for the operators, and making it more convenient for the hackers.

The type of control systems that essentially manage the pumps and the valves in all these facilities were designed 20, 30 years ago. They are very easily penetrable, very easy to disable them, very easy to manipulate them. Could you do that? So the short answer is yes.

retract into the reservoir systems to show us how dangerous a simple piece of malware could be. First, he shut down the valves which drain the sewage. Simultaneously, he manipulated the system's display to indicate that everything was operating normally. Is there not a big red sign saying

'alert! You've been hacked!' Exactly. The eventual result of this would be the reservoirs filling up and having a toxic overflow. This is theoretical. Can you give me an example of where this happened in the real world? So I'd like to refute the fact that it's

theoretical because, as recent as a few months ago, in the Ukraine power grid, that was being shut down. Industrial control systems got hacked. A few years ago, we had reporting by the German government that a furnace was being blown up in a steel mill due to a cyberattack.

It's the same industrial control systems. If I hacked one of them, I can hack presumably all the others. At war, this is, without exaggeration, life-threatening. Attacks... if I hack into a pharmaceutical plant and I change the composition of the drugs, if I hack into an oil rig and cause an oil spill, if I

create too much pressure in oil pipelines, all of these are no longer data and privacy issues. It starts to be safety and life-threatening situations. I have zero doubt in my mind that currently, critical infrastructures in the Western world already have malware inside, just ready for someone to press that red button and shut off a power grid. The weapons are loaded, essentially. I think so.

That's exactly the definition. Ideas... while cybersecurity companies become more and more in demand, the crippling potential of cyber warfare only continues to grow. What we're talking about here is a total revolution of the whole concept of war. It changes everything we thought about war and how it's been conducted,

and what are the rules, and who is the enemy, and can you recognize the enemy at all? Many countries have very dangerous cyber tools. Some are using it viciously, like the Russians, like the Chinese, and are not shy of using them against other countries. We all understand the vulnerabilities of critical infrastructure, and we all understand the vulnerabilities of privacy,

but what troubles me is the ability to affect the mindset of masses, the mindset of the public. The Russians were manipulating American public mindset. That's scary, and that, I suspect, would eventually undermine most of Western democracies in the coming decade. I fear that the good 70 years post-World War II of

prospering democracies in the Western world and prosperity, economic prosperity, are over.

How Israel Rules The World Of Cyber Security | VICE on HBO

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Demonstration of car hacking vulnerabilities.

A demonstration in Tel Aviv shows how easy it is to cyberattack a modern car.

The hacker uses a wireless adapter to access the car's Wi-Fi.

The hacker manipulates car functions like windows, blinkers, speedometer, and engine.

The demonstration highlights the potential for physical harm through hacking.

Israel's rise as a cybersecurity powerhouse.

Israel is home to leading auto security companies and is a global leader in cyber technology.

Prime Minister Netanyahu emphasizes Israel's position as a top cybersecurity power.

Israel attracts significant global investment in cybersecurity and venture capital.

Israel's unique geopolitical situation and constant surveillance needs fostered cyber innovation.

The Israeli military's influence on the cybersecurity industry.

The IDF's cyber and intelligence units, with thousands of soldiers, contribute to the industry.

Relocation of cyber units to Be'er Sheva is creating a cyber hub.

Mandatory military service exposes young Israelis to advanced technology and training.

High school programs feed into IDF cyber units, starting recruitment early.

The growing threat of cyberattacks and data breaches.

Cyberattacks can be launched easily through methods like email phishing.

Stolen data is sold on the darknet, including personal and business information.

Data breaches and hacked emails pose significant risks, as seen in the 2016 election.

Critical infrastructure is vulnerable due to increased interconnectivity.