Former MI chief Yadlin: Cyber threat overrated

"With all due respect for cyber, in the end you need soldiers on the hilltops to defeat an enemy," former IDF Military Intelligence Directorate head Maj. Gen. (res.) Amos Yadlin said yesterday at an evening at the Academic Center for Law and Science marking the publication of the book "Regulation in Cyberspace." Yadlin quoted former US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta as warning about a "cyber Pearl Harbor," and said, "Just like nuclear weapons are another dimension, and people are still making war with Kalashnikov rifles and airplanes, cyber is just another dimension. There are enough people who would love to stage another Pearl Harbor, but they can't do it, so you always have to ask what is true and what isn't, and where a new dimension has really arisen and where it hasn't yet."

Yadlin aimed a barb at National Cyber Security Authority director general Yigal Unna, who also took part in the conference and who warned, concerning the cyber threat, warned, "Winter is coming." Yadlin said, "In the future, cyber may turn out to be winter is coming or Pearl Harbor, but we're not there yet."

Yadlin stated explicitly that the cyber threat was overrated, and accused both the cyber companies and the cyber security apparatus. "Who has an interest in exaggerating things?," he asked, and answered, "The security technology companies, and maybe also the national agencies. You should always ask, 'If it's so good, why doesn't it make a difference?' When someone comes to me with an invention, I stop and say, 'Wait a minute, there are things that it isn't changing yet.' If this is so powerful, why have the Russians been fighting in Syria for three years and haven't won yet? Why is the US still fighting in Afghanistan after 17 years?"

Yadlin said that the real threat comes from parties trying to interfere with the democratic process, as was allegedly done in the US presidential elections in the Cambridge Analytica affair, in which information leaked from Facebook was used to influence public opinion in the US before the elections.

"There is a risk of disrupting the delicate balance that we have created in modern society, in which there are values and the ability to distinguish between right and wrong and whether or not something is a fact. This is a bigger danger than a hacker breaking into a power station and shutting it down. It's not so easy, and it's also not so critical."

Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on October 25, 2018

Former MI chief Yadlin: Cyber threat overrated

"The real threat is interference in the democratic process by foreign parties."