Israel Takes Steps to Tighten Information Security in Wake of Wikileaks

Despite advances in technology, no system is immune

The flood of internal U.S. State Department cables uploaded onto the Wikileaks website has heightened efforts in Israel to better secure information in a country, which has seen its ability to censor secret information deemed vital to national security wane in the digital era.

Following the recent furor surrounding the transfer of hundreds of thousands of documents to the Wikileaks web site, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced it was taking more measures to track top secret data and alert to unusual access into army computers. The IDF was embarrassed by a small-scale leak earlier this year when an army secretary, Anat Kamm, is alleged to have copied over 2,000 classified documents and passed them on to a journalist.

The Israel army has installed a system that follows the trail of documents moving from one place to another, and records who prints them and who burns them onto compact disks. It also sets off alarms when disk-on-key devices are inserted into IDF computers.

It also prevents top secret documents from being transferred to someone without the proper security clearance. Brig.-Gen. Ayala Hakim, head of the army division that manages computers and communications systems, said the army was constantly enhancing measures to secure classified information.

“There’s no leak-proof network,” said the head of the Israel Army’s C4I Technology Division. “But through a combination of discipline, technology, training and procedures that compartmentalize sources of information, we’ve enhanced our operational security and are coming as close as possible to 100% protection,” Hakim told reporters at a recent press conference that the army

Besides thorough background checks of soldiers serving in sensitive positions, the Israeli military has also reportedly increased the number of polygraph tests it conducts on soldiers and officers by 50% in the past year.

The recent revelation of hundreds of thousands of classified documents on Wikileaks has also brought to fore the potential of serious data loss prevention (DLP) systems, which are designed to detect and prevent the unauthorized use and transmission of confidential information. Israel is home to a large number of information security companies, which sell software designed to spot and stop suspicious behavior on computers.

Eli Hizkiyev, chief executive officer of Cryptzone, an Israeli company dealing with preventing information security, said user-monitoring software was one of the main instruments used to catch possible theft of data. The software is usually designed to sound alarms when it detects users downloading large quantities of data or certain type of data, such as credit card numbers. It is widely used in the private sector and many government offices.

But Hizkiyev said that ultimately technology and censorship weren’t enough to prevent leaks and information theft.

“This is an issue of awareness. You can install the most sophisticated measures, but if people don’t have awareness then nothing can help,” Hizkiyev told The Media Line.

Aiding the wall against leaks is MALMAB, the security arm of the Israel Defense Ministry, which is more powerful and more secretive than the Israel military censor. Officially, MALMAB is responsible for the security of defense installations, but in fact the unit is mainly concerned with preventing any leaks regarding Israel’s alleged arsenal of nuclear weapons and top secret data about the country.

A request by The Media Line to interview the head of MALMAB, Amir Keen, was flatly rejected.

Amir Rappaport, a senior military analyst at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, said had a double-barreled apparatus in place to prevent leaks from reaching the public. The first was MALMAB and the IDF’s Information Security arms, whose purpose is to prevent data from being leaked. The second is the media censorship of information that has already been leaked. All media outlets in Israel and the foreign media must agree to abide by the terms of laws imposed by the British when they ruled Palestine to prevent publication of information deemed harmful to state security.

“The problem with all this is that while MALMAB and the censor may be serious bodies, they are restricted to the defense establishment. They have no control over the Foreign Ministry for example,” Rappaport told The Media Line.

Following the latest leaks of diplomatic cables, the U.S. State Department entered self protection mode and restricted the access of classified information from being shared with other U.S. agencies.

Before the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, .the United States employed much stricter “need-to-know” classifications on confidential documents. Ironically, that helped the terrorists to move forward with their plot because government officials couldn’t easily share information.

Subsequently, the U.S. let down some of its secrecy guard to allow better communication among various intelligence bodies. Some half a million people employed in the U.S. military and government agencies have access to the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, or SIPRNet, the worldwide web of the intelligence world.

Stung by Wikileaks several times, the U.S. is now engaged in a shift away from information sharing is the price to be paid for that post 9/11 openness. But a top official of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) reacted by cautioning against a heavy roll back on information sharing.

If the U.S. failed somewhere, “it is not in sharing, but in implementing the appropriate safeguards to detect this volume of downloading,” Canadian Army Maj. Gen. Glynne Hines, who oversees the alliance’s information sharing policy as director of the NATO command, control and consultation staff in Brussels, was quoted as saying by Defense News.

Unlike Israel, in the U.S., user-monitoring software capable of sounding alarms when users download large amounts of date isn’t yet in place, according to Defense News.