President Isaac Herzog's Telegram account was hacked on Wednesday in an incident suspected of having a criminal background, the President's Residence announced on Thursday.
The Shin Bet is handling the situation. There is no concern about information being leaked. The hack has been handled and the account is back under the president's control.
Dr. Gilad Leibovitch, academic director for a wide array of cybersecurity-related study tracks at Haifa's Technion, addressed the event, saying:
"In cases like this, it must be assumed that the attack was designed to obtain high-level intelligence information...the most common technique used by hackers is 'phishing.' They present themselves as a trustworthy person or corporate entity, sometimes impersonating the official communications of an app such as Telegram, and trick the recipient into revealing sensitive information."
Leibovitch added that two-step verification on apps like Telegram is an effective way to avoid such a situation.
Previous hacking attempts targeting Israel
In late September, Slovak ESET cybersecurity company reported that an Iranian hacker group called OilRig hijacked a series of legitimate websites in order to target Israeli organizations throughout 2021 and 2022.
OilRig carried out two separate campaigns, which collected browsing history, cookies, usernames, and passwords on targeted devices. Targeted organizations included a healthcare institution, a job portal website, and a human resources site.
In April of 2023, a group of hackers who called themselves "Anonymous Sudan" took down websites belonging to one of Israel's largest cyber security companies, Check Point.
Earlier in the day, the websites of multiple major universities in Israel were also attacked by the same group, and were down for several hours.
Among the websites unavailable for browsing were the sites of Tel Aviv University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Haifa University, Weizmann Institute of Science, Open University of Israel and Reichman University.
Tzvi Joffre contributed to this report.