IDF has rebuffed 3 billion cyberattacks since Oct. 7, colonel claims

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have nixed somewhere in the range of 3 billion cyberattack attempts since last fall, an army chief said this week.

The claim, circulated across Israeli news outlets, was made by Colonel Racheli Dembinsky, commander of the IDF’s Center of Computing and Information Systems, also known as Mamram. Mamram, essentially, is the IT organization for Israel’s military, providing, maintaining, and defending its intranet, cloud systems, data processing, public-facing websites, and more.

As Dembinsky recalled at the IT for IDF conference in the city of Rishon LeTsiyon, an uptick in threats to Israel’s military systems dates back to the terror attack on Oct. 7. “I received a phone call that morning and thought there was a malfunction in the alert system,” she said. “I quickly understood there wasn’t a malfunction, but a broader attack. Also, we immediately understood this wasn’t fake. I put on my uniform and drove to the base. We began transitioning to emergency mode.”

The strain on the IDF’s systems continued in the weeks thereafter, as hundreds of thousands of reservists were quickly recruited into the war effort, and Mamram began allocating computing resources at 120% capacity.

According to Dembinsky, cyberattacks against the IDF in recent months have involved operational systems central to the military’s functioning, such as those that ground forces rely on to coordinate information sharing in real-time. She did not provide details on the nature of the attacks, but noted that the many billions of them had been blocked.

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