Israel is a global cyber power. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has boasted more than once that Israel is involved in almost 20% of cyber business in the world, either directly or indirectly, with partial involvement of Israeli cyber companies. Israel’s sophisticated, upgraded intelligence systems constitute an inexhaustible source of experienced, creative, professional and brilliant manpower that has transformed the Israeli cyber industry into the twin of Israel’s successful hi-tech industry. The Start-up Nation is also the Cyber Nation. However, it turns out that all these achievements are accompanied by worries and troubles.
Israeli tech experts and internet activists Noam Rotem and Yuval Adam released on Nov. 6 an investigative report uncovering an extensive cyber network that they described as “a large bot project, [Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu’s fan club,” that operated on the Twitter network. The two experts also wrote that soon they will uncover additional, similar networks, only larger and more extensively branched. The techies said that they brought the data that they’d accumulated to Twitter, which then removed the hundreds of phony accounts from the network and closed them.
These accounts — bots as well as human-run accounts — were all characterized by “pathetic veneration” of Netanyahu, but also by deep loathing for his wife, Sara Netanyahu. The Israeli investigators are unable to connect the operation of this network to Netanyahu himself. The Likud party denied any connection to this activity on Twitter or other networks.
Another strange thing is that there is evidence these networks were managed from abroad through various channels. Some of these accounts received operating instructions from users on the network in Turkish. Another curious fact is that network activity reached its heights on dates in which events connected to US President Donald Trump took place, sometimes Trump alone and sometimes with Netanyahu: Trump’s visit to Jerusalem (May 2017), the relocation of the US Embassy to Jerusalem (May 2018), the US withdrawal from the nuclear agreement with Iran (May 2018) and more.
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