It was late March with only weeks until the April 9 Israeli election.

There was Blue and White Party leader Benny Gantz, one minute skyrocketing in the polls and the next minute slamming into a ceiling and squandering momentum following losing control of an interview with Channel 12’s Yonit Levy. (Gantz ended up repeating the word “Yonit” several times, until he could figure out how to respond to the embarrassing line of questioning.)

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Putting aside the particular question, the whole situation started going badly for Gantz when it was revealed that his personal cellphone had been hacked by Iran.

That’s right, around three years after Russia hacked the US presidential 2016 elections, there are still cyber vulnerabilities at the highest levels for countries like Israel, the US and within the EU.

The positive secondary impact of Russia’s 2016 election hacking was that countries across the globe and giant social media platforms were finally shocked into starting a cyber defense revolution….

As early as 2008, Russia used cyber warfare against Georgia on a grand scale to bring much of the country’s government institutions to a halt.

And cybersecurity has been a hot item in the business sector for the better part of a decade.

But it has been a long slog and 2016 was a tipping point when Western governments realized that the tools of cyber aggressors like Russia were light years beyond their cyber defense capabilities, especially in deflecting social media influence operations….

The threats and hacking tools that powers like Russia can employ, as well as second-tier threats like Iran, North Korea, Hezbollah, and Hamas, have substantially advanced as well. There are also continued reports of more and more foreign countries using NSA and CIA cyber tools they stole to interfere and hack….

(Excerpts from The Jerusalem Post article by Yona Jeremy Bob.)