Special to WorldTribune.com

TEL AVIV — Israel has raised the prospect of conducting cyber
warfare to stop attacks from neighboring Egypt.

Officials said the Israeli intelligence community and military have been
drafting options to counter Palestinian and Al Qaida-aligned attacks from
Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

The officials said Sinai was becoming a launching pad for
Hamas, Al Qaida and Iranian-sponsored militias.

“We can’t do operations [in Egypt] as we do in the Gaza Strip,” Israeli
Vice Premier Moshe Ya’alon said.

Addressing the Miltech-2012 conference and exhibition on May 8, Ya’alon, responsible for detecting and countering strategic threats against Israel, said cyberwarfare would allow the Jewish state to foil insurgency squads from Sinai. He said cyber assets would not violate Egyptian sovereignty or spark international condemnation.

“If you can have night operations so the helicopters can’t be filmed, so
much the better,” Ya’alon said.

The minister did not detail Israel’s cyber capabilities, said to have included the development of the Stuxnet virus that disrupted Iran’s nuclear program in 2010. The military’s Intelligence Corps has been assigned the task to develop cyberwarfare capabilities.

“We need to develop cyber,” Chief Intelligence Officer Brig. Gen. Ariel
Karo told the conference. “It will become increasingly important.”

Israel itself has been facing increasing cyber attacks. Interpol
president Khoo Boon Hui said Israel confronts 10,000 cyber attacks every
minute, most of them attributed to criminals.

Officials acknowledged that the military was banned from operating in
Sinai even if insurgency squads were spotted near the Israeli border. They
said the exception would be an abduction of an Israeli soldier.

“Even if I identify a rocket launcher we couldn’t do anything by
ourselves,” Brig. Gen. Nadav Padan, a southern division commander, told the
Israeli daily Mekor Rishon. “If we identify the abduction of a soldier to
outside the territory of the state of Israel, we will pursue the squad even
over the border. But if we don’t identify or see anything, we would have
difficulty operating there.”

  Brig. Gen. Ariel Karo, Brig. Gen. Nadav Padan, insurgency squads from Sinai, Interpol, Israel weighs cyberwar ops to stop attacks from Sinai, Israeli cyber assets, Stuxnet virus, Vice Premier Moshe Ya’alon