Iran's cyber attackers are trying to manufacture a sort of picture of victory in its cyberwar with Israel since in the physical world it has faced embarrassing losses, Israel National Cyber Directorate Chief Yossi Karadi said on Tuesday.
They have been extremely frustrated that they have failed to create such a picture to date, said Karadi.
The INCD chief noted that Iran has recently attempted a mix of kinetic and cyber attacks against major Israeli and Gulf states' utilities, including the gas sector.
Despite extensive efforts by the Iranians to use cyber weapons to harm Israel's critical infrastructure, no major harm has occurred to date, with their largest victory being taking over Israel Railways monitors in a couple of locations on March 11.
During that period, they broadcast false messages to try to cause panic and confusion among railway travelers, but even such a "success" is considered far less dangerous than direct harm to electrical, water, or other critical utilities.
Iran cyber attacks hit 50 Israeli businesses
In addition, Karadi said that Iran has tried in recent weeks to wipe out thousands of Israeli businesses by deleting all of their data, but only succeeded 50 times.
Karadi said the INCD, IDF, Shin Bet, and other security agencies have so far prevented the worst-case cyber scenario from transpiring.
Next, Karadi was asked if a reported US kinetic attack to kill top Iranians running their Handala hacker group had impacted the threat from that group.
He responded that there was a clear impact on Handala's competency and professionalism after the US strike.
Also, he said that the war generally surprised and set back Iranian hackers in its early days.
However, he also said that the nature of the cyber realm is that hacking attacks can be maintained by a wide variety of cyber agents, even if one or more hacking command centers are destroyed or disabled.
In that sense, keeping up with cyber attacks is less dependent on large physical spaces than maintaining physical attacks.