Where have all the Jewish geeks gone?
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Cyber war: Talk is cheap
Op-ed: Instead of empty talk in face of cyber attacks, we need to deploy Jewish geeks
The Israeli government is again not doing enough to protect us against the so-called online “terror,”
just like it didn’t do enough in the past to protect us against real terrorism, when it was still raging on our streets.
Back then, we also heard plenty of “strategic” chatter, yet nobody could predict where the next attack would occur or prevent it. And when the websites of credit card companies and banks collapse before our very eyes in recent weeks like houses of cards during an earthquake, these developments speak for themselves.
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However, the most interesting fact is that Israel’s establishment reflexively characterized this phenomenon as “terrorism.” After all, all of us are experts on eradicating terror. The moment we framed the problem and placed it in a familiar, convenient category, we are only left with the minor problem of resolving this issue. Yet reality shows there these things are unrelated?
Do we care, for example, that the dangerous “terrorist” who can bring down the National Insurance Institute tomorrow morning, for example, thereby disrupting the payment of allowances to hundreds of thousands of Israelis, will turn out to be an bored Indonesian or Italian boy who decided to do something interesting on his break between one computer game and another?
What are we going to do about him? Will we dispatch an anti-terror squad to his home that would confiscate his laptop and reprimand him?
War of the geeks
The simple truth is that we are dealing with a technological confrontation of a wholly new type. However, it spears that precisely here we can utilize the famous Jewish genius, the one we are so proud of.
After al, Israel is a high-tech superpower in the field of information security. So why not do the simplest thing? Hire the services of Israeli experts who will protect our servers from attacks. That is, deploy our finest geeks against the other side’s finest geeks. Feed them with pizza and cola and order them to eradicate our virtual enemies.
We always took pride in the fact that chess is the most Jewish sport. And now, with the game shifting to our court, we finally have an opportunity to win it, just the way we know and love to do: Using our brainpower, and without getting up from our chair.
