Someone in Israel’s Electricity Authority, a government department charged with providing utility services, fell for a phishing attack, opened an email and thereby was infected with ransomware which reportedly spread to other computers in the network. Yet the department chose to take the computers offline. Details are somewhat sketchy, but it appears that the media heard “electric,” “paralyzed” and “severe cyber attack” before reporting the Israeli power grid was hacked and taken down.

There are over 10,000 cybersecurity professionals attending Cybertech 2016 Conference in Tel Aviv. The audience was supposedly thinning out during the final Cybertech panel, according to Haaretz, but when Yuval Steinitz, the Israeli Minister of National Infrastructure, Energy and Water, started talking about the “severe cyber attack” on Israel’s Electricity Authority, he had everyone’s full attention. “Yesterday we identified one of the largest cyber attacks that we have experienced,” Steinitz stated.

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