Massive DDoS Attack Knocked Israeli Government Websites Offline

A number of websites belonging to the Israeli government were felled in a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on Monday, rendering the portals inaccessible for a short period of time.

"In the past few hours, a DDoS attack against a communications provider was identified," the Israel National Cyber Directorate (INCD) said in a tweet. "As a result, access to several websites, among them government websites, was denied for a short time. As of now, all of the websites have returned to normal activity."

A distributed denial-of-service attack is a malicious attempt to hamper the normal traffic of a targeted server or service by overwhelming the victim and its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of junk internet traffic by leveraging compromised computers and IoT devices as sources of attack traffic.

The development comes after internet watchdog NetBlocks reported "significant disruptions" registered on multiple networks supplied by Israel's telecom providers Bezeq and Cellcom.

The INCD has not pinned the attacks to a specific threat actor, but Jerusalem Post alluded to the possibility that the incident could have been the work of an Iranian-affiliated hacker group in retaliation for alleged attempted sabotage of the nation's Fordow nuclear enrichment plant.

This is not the first time DDoS attacks have been mounted against government IT infrastructure, what with the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war paving the way for a series of "tit-for-tat" DDoS attack campaigns on both sides.

On top of that, a vulnerability in Mitel MiCollab and MiVoice Business Express collaboration systems was recently weaponized to carry out sustained distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks for up to 14 hours with a record-breaking amplification ratio of 4.3 billion to 1.

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