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Israel Faces Unprecedented Cyber Threats as Data Breaches Reach Petabyte Scale

Cyber Security

Business Honor
19 February, 2026

Nation among World's Top Three Cyber Attack Targets amid Rising Phishing and Influence Operations.

The INCD has noted that Israel ranks among the top three countries in the world for cyber-attacks, which indicates how far these cyber threats have evolved and grown in number since they first showed up for Israel's digital infrastructures. Approximately 2 petabytes of data have been compromised from Israeli organizations over the last few years, representing an unprecedented amount of compromised data. For reference, if you take all of the digital data in the entire National Library in Israel, it would equal about 20 Terabytes of data, which means that hackers have taken around 100 National Libraries worth of data from Israeli organizations.

In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, Yossi Karadi, Chief of the Israel National Cyber Directorate, has presented figures regarding the rapidly changing nature of cyber threats. There has been a marked increase in the scale and sophistication of malware attacks based upon the differences between breaches of 'megabytes'/ 'petabytes'. There has been an increase in the sophistication of cyber criminals and their ability to mount increasingly large and complex attacks against organizations. The overall landscape of cybercrime has changed from primarily data/identity theft to encompass many new forms of cyber-attack. As an example of this progression, there was a 35% increase in phishing attacks and a 170% increase in cyber influence operations (using the internet to sway opinions) between 2025 and 2020.

Cyber influence campaigns use various mechanisms to manipulate public opinion instead of stealing sensitive information. These complex operations will attempt to change the outcome of public policy and alter the public narrative in selected areas and countries. Historical cases have shown how cyber-based influence operations have affected political outcomes. For example, investigations into Russian interference during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election provided evidence of the geopolitical ramifications associated with concerted cyber influence operations, although investigators believed that the election results would have probably occurred anyway.