(Bloomberg) -- How does a cybersecurity powerhouse guard its elections against online manipulation?
Not as well as you’d think.
While Israeli engineers develop some of the world’s most sought-after online protection, the government has yet to come up with a coordinated defense to shield the April 9 vote against fake news and other malicious meddling. According to the Israel Democracy Institute research center, responsibility for protecting the vote is divided among at least nine entities.
Non-governmental players are stepping into the breach, and volunteers say they’ve already uncovered hundreds of fake accounts with links to Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia and domestic political parties.
There are even suspicions that the primaries in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party last week were compromised. The party ordered a recount following complaints of discrepancies in the number of ballots cast versus the number of voters, but denied a hack, saying the votes were tabulated in a closed computerized system. The Haaretz newspaper’s tech writer, Ran Bar-Zik, a web developer who has focused on security, said, however, there was a serious security breach that exposed the results to tampering.
“Those who set up the server relied on its address remaining secret,” but it was inadvertently disclosed, he wrote in Haaretz. “Once it was revealed, anyone could change the recount as he or she pleased.”
Polarized Electorate
In a deeply divided country like Israel, which has always been governed by a coalition of parties, small election margins can be decisive. A movement of a few seats could tilt the breakdown of conservative and liberal blocs.
Concerns about foreign intervention have come from officials as senior as Nadav Argaman, head of the domestic Shin Bet security service, and Hanan Melcer, the Supreme Court judge who heads the Central Election Committee.
“I can’t say I’m at ease,” Melcer said. “I’m concerned.”
Cyber security specialists say a major aim of peddling disinformation and fake news is to deepen the rifts in Israel’s already polarized society, inflaming conflicts between conservatives and liberals, Jews and Arabs, secular and religious. Another is to infiltrate Israeli news sites and distribution lists to disseminate disinformation.
An Iranian network sought to “follow” an online Israeli news service, Walla, as well as Israeli politicians and journalists, said Noam Rotem, a web activist who’s been volunteering to identify and block manipulation. He and a colleague asked social media companies to block the network and they did, he said.