Israel's Cyber Agency Warns of Hacked Cameras and Fake Alerts

Israel's National Cyber Directorate called on the public and on organisations to increase their vigilance and take protective measures in light of the continuing state of emergency, according to the statement issued on 8 June 2026 and carried by the Tazpit Press Service. The directorate is the government body responsible for defending Israeli civilian cyberspace, and it said it was operating on heightened alert and monitoring for hostile activity against the state.

Experience from previous rounds of fighting, the directorate said, is that hostile actors work in cyberspace during such periods to damage organisations, collect information, apply psychological pressure and erode the public's sense of security. It listed the trends it expected to intensify: attempts to break into private and public security cameras for information-gathering and observation; the reuse of previously leaked data for influence, intimidation and the misrepresentation of new events; attempts to disable organisations through wiper and encryption attacks; the exploitation of known vulnerabilities in systems that have not been patched; and the spread of phishing messages, messages impersonating official authorities, and intimidating messages and phone calls designed to create pressure and confusion.

Why the cameras come first on the list

The camera warning is not hypothetical. The directorate said it had identified more than 40 cases of Iranian groups breaking into Israeli security cameras during the campaign against Iran, and warned that hundreds of thousands of cameras across the country remain exposed, Ynetnews reported. A compromised camera can be used to track the movement of forces in public spaces, confirm where a missile landed, and gather other sensitive detail in real time.

The remedies it recommends are unglamorous: change the factory password, keep the firmware updated, switch off the remote-access features known as P2P and UPnP that manufacturers often enable by default, turn on two-factor authentication, and keep business cameras on a separate network. In June 2025 the directorate issued a similar public instruction to homeowners and businesses to change camera passwords immediately, warning that improperly configured cameras could be exploited by Iran and its allies, The Jerusalem Post reported at the time.

When the phishing message wears the state's uniform

The directorate's warning about messages impersonating official authorities describes a documented technique. In March 2026 attackers sent Israelis SMS messages pushing a counterfeit version of the Red Alert emergency-warning app; installed, it harvested location data, text messages, contacts and account details and could overlay fake login screens to capture passwords and one-time codes, The Register reported. Researchers attributed the campaign to Arid Viper, a Hamas-aligned espionage group active since at least 2013, and described it as indiscriminate rather than targeted. The directorate and Israeli news outlets issued public warnings about it.

The pattern is consistent: the more a population depends on official alerts, the more valuable it becomes to impersonate them.

What is still unclear

The statement did not attribute the activity it described to any particular state or group, did not say how many attacks had been detected during the current emergency, and named no sector as being under particular pressure. It set out no threshold at which the directorate would issue a specific alert, and gave no figures for successful intrusions as opposed to attempts.