Gen. Yair Naveh
צילום: ערוץ 2
Life in the jungle
The creators of the Trojan Horse software tried their product out on unsuspecting 12-year-olds. Are there no red lines?
Before software developers Ruth and Michael HaEfrati presented their program to the business, world, they tried it out on a group of innocent civilians.
Every new gun needs a testing ground, computer espionage is no differnt. The HaEfratis found their testing ground in a small neighborhood in Tel Aviv. Their first victims were 12-year-old school kids.
Michael HaEfrati became interested in one particular class following a family dispute (because the victims are minors, all identifying characteristics have been deleted). He asked one of the children in the class to do some work for him, something the child was forbidden by his parents from agreeing to.
Soon after, other children in the class, especially girls, began receiving threatening and pornographic emails supposedly from the first kid, on their home computers. The child denied the ensuing accusations, but classmates found the denials hard to believe.
Who knew Trojan Horses speak Hebrew?
Digital Terror
Aryeh Ofner is the Israeli head of CA, an American company specializing in information security. The company stands to capitalize nicely on the Trojan Horse scandal, but he remains worried, nonetheless.
“(The scandal) is damaging in two ways.,” he says. “First, it creates the impression of having broken a concept, that everything we’ve done in the industry up to now amounts to nothing.
“Secondly, it gives the impression that the Trojan Horse is the problem. But if information security is like 10 fingers, the Trojan Horse scandal is no more than the little pinky,” he says.
He also says that “someone who only takes care of that little pinky will surely pay a much dearer price with the rest of his fingers.”
“OK,” I asked him. “So a couple of big companies got screwed. Why should this worry the rest of us?”
He looked at me over the top of his glasses, saying, “we must approach this like digital terror. Breaking into a computer could bring this country to a halt. It could create a security issue, grind the country’s economy to a halt, destroy the banks. It could even reach the country’s food supply.
According to Ofner, the country’s legal structure is “not built” to take care of digital crime, and that red lines here have been crossed.
“We live in a jungle,” he says. “Israeli managers have no red lines. All the stereotypes of the scheming, dishonest Israeli find expression (in the business world). We create problems as well as we fix them.”
He also says it will take months to figure out if business leaders have learned their lesson.
“Managers must understand that the game has changed. If, in nine months from now, the country suffers some catastrophe, we will know we have failed to get this message across.”
No rubber stamp
On Sunday the government decided to release 400 security prisoners, in accordance with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s agreement with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas back in February. Even (right wing Knesset Member) Tzahi Hanegbi understood there was no choice.
Together with Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, then-Chief of Staff Moshe Yaalon and other top generals, Sharon needed formulated a list of prisoners to be released, passed the list by Justice Minister Tzipi Livni and brought it to the government for approval, which it won by a large margin.
That should have been the end of the story, but here in Israel, every Tom, Dick and Harry who disagrees with the government is king, be it some settler punk blocking the roads or an IDF general.
Because the current group of released prisoners were all sentenced by a military tribunal, their release orders had to be signed by the IDF commanders in each region. For instance, the commander of the IDF Southern Command had to sign off on the Gaza prisoners, and the commander of the IDF Central Command on the order freeing prisoners from the West Bank.
At first, all was fine and dandy: southern commander Gen. Dan Harel signed off on the Gaza folks, no problem. Then came commander of the Central Command, Gen. Yair Naveh.
Neveh objected to the list, and refused to sign the order until several prisoners who belong to the People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine were removed from the list, saying he refused to be a “rubber stamp.”
Now, there is certainly no shortage of chutzpah in this country, but an IDF general refusing to execute government decisions, and especially political decisions, is certainly something new.
Neveh is the most problematic issues Yaalon left behind for new Chief of Staff Dan Halutz. He is the general who shook up the Paratroopers Brigade by praising the settlers of the northern Samarian community of Yitzhar, calling them “pioneers”, and to a large degree, he is the product of the ongoing strife between Yaalon and Mofaz, who couldn’t agree on a candidate to head the Central Command, so in the end they got someone that neither wanted.
For his part, a spokesman for Gen. Naveh said the general “refuses to speak about issues that arise as part of professional and operational matters.”
