To influence an election in Israel, you do not have to hack the ballot box.

It is enough to make us stop trusting each other. And the result.

This is not hypothetical. In 2019 the head of the Shin Bet warned that a foreign state was planning to interfere in Israel’s elections through cyber operations. An INSS study documented Iranian activity on Israeli social networks in 2020-2022. The aim was not necessarily to advance one political side, but to deepen the divisions already here.

We have seen the method abroad too.

In the United States in 2016, Russia combined hacks, leaks and influence activity. In France in 2017, Macron campaign computers were breached and thousands of emails leaked two days before the second round, alongside rumors and forged documents. In the United States in 2024, Iran ran a hack-and-leak operation against the Trump campaign, while Russia had already incorporated AI-generated content.

The important point is that attackers do not always try to change a vote. Sometimes it is enough to steal genuine material, mix it with a forgery, distribute it from an account that looks local, and let us do the rest.

In Israel this risk is especially high. A charged election, a polarized society, war in the background, and information moving faster than our ability to check it.

The State Comptroller wrote this year that Israel still has no comprehensive national policy for dealing with foreign online influence, no single body leading the effort, and that much of the election preparation begins too late.

So what should we do?

Campaigns and parties should protect their accounts, phones and suppliers as they would a critical system: phishing-resistant MFA, narrow permissions, monitoring, and drills for a hack-and-leak scenario.

The state must identify, attribute and expose influence operations quickly. Not months later.

And we, the public, need to pause before sharing. Especially when “dramatic” content arrives from a source we did not know yesterday.

In the next election, the attack will not be only on the systems.
It will be on our trust.

#InformationSecurity #Cyber #Elections #ForeignInfluence #CISO

Originally published in Hebrew on LinkedIn: view the original post