Israel’s Health Ministry reported Nov. 8 during an urgent Knesset hearing that the Hillel Yaffe Medical Center had still not returned to fully normal operations some four weeks after undergoing a massive cyberattack. “We are in a third world war on cyber,” Reuven Eliyahu, director of information security and cyber at the Health Ministry, told lawmakers at the hearing convened to discuss growing cyberattacks on Israeli health-care institutions. Israel, he added, blocks hundreds of such attacks every month.

The Oct. 13 attack on Hillel Yaffe, a major hospital in the town of Hadera serving the north-central part of the country, was the most sophisticated and damaging of them all, bringing down and locking all the facility’s computer systems, both administrative and medical. The hospital responded with preventive measures, shutting off all its computerized digital systems, ranging from medical imaging equipment to doors and parking garages.

Despite intense repair work, the facility is still not fully back online, with some of the affected data not yet retrieved and some systems still disabled. Experts say the ransom ware attack had all the hallmarks of “state-sponsored” cybercapabilities, although Israel did not point a finger at the obvious culprit, Tehran, not even after a subsequent powerful attack on the Mor Medical Centers run by Israel’s largest HMO, Clalit, that also caused significant damage.

Although it avoided casting blame on Iran, in a rare coincidence, Iran experienced a particularly powerful cyberattack on its gas stations Oct. 26, causing massive and prolonged disruptions at pumps throughout the country. The lines outside the port of Bandar Abbas in May 2020 when a cyberattack shut down its computer systems and paralyzed operations was replaced by endless lines of cars and furious drivers who simply wanted to fill up on gas, but found themselves using the last of their tank reserves as they waited for the pumps to resume working.