The first signs are emerging of a serious cyber-attack, the third within two weeks, against Israeli companies. After the attack on insurance company Shirbit a week and a half ago and the attack on software company Amital at the end of last week, Iranian hacker group Pay2Key said yesterday that it had broken into servers of artificial intelligence (AI) chips company Habana Labs, which was bought by Intel a year ago for $2 billion. According to the statement by the hackers, the stolen information relates to Habana Labs' "Goya" chip.
Industry sources say that there is no connection between the attacks, which were carried out by different groups. Each attack exhibits different characteristics. Nevertheless, the three cases have had the highest media profile of any cyber-attacks against Israeli organizations and enterprises.
Information security company Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (Nasdaq: CHKP) says that it discovered the Pay2Key hacker group at the end of last year. According to Check Point Threat Intelligence Group manager Lotem Finkelstein, the group has already successfully attacked twelve Israeli companies, but all these incidents went unreported. Now, he says, we may be seeing a second wave.
In the previous wave, Finkelstein says, the hackers published their messages only on the dark net, but now they have published information about the information they claim to have stolen on Twitter as well. He says past messages from the group proved to be reliable.
Chip development, and especially development of chips for processing AI tasks, is the focus of fierce competition between Western technology giants, and between the West in general and China. The leading Western company in AI chip development is Nvidia. Habana Labs is one of the few companies in the world with pretensions to presenting an alternative to it. If the hackers did indeed succeed in laying hands on the engineering IP behind the development of Habana Labs' Goya chip, this could have strategic implications, beyond the damage to Habana Labs' owner Intel.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on December 14, 2020
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