Are We Prepared for the Middle East’s Next Battleground?

By Published on August 17, 2015

For the past year, the attention of policymakers and pundits following the Middle East has been absorbed with the twin problems of Iran’s nuclear program and the Islamic State. At the same time, however, another threat emanating from the region has quietly —with potentially significant repercussions for America and its allies. Consider that since June 1:

  • The U.S. Army’s public website was taken offline due to a Distributed Denial of Service attack by Syrian hackers;
  • Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon publicly confirmed that Hezbollah was behind a “Volatile Cedar,” a three-year cyber-spying campaign targeting Israel, Western countries, and other Middle Eastern states;
  • WikiLeaks published 70,000 documents from the Saudi Foreign Ministry believed to have been among a half million documents stolen by Iranian hackers; and
  • A group of hackers claiming affiliation with the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) took down the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights’ website and threatened its director.

Read the article “Are We Prepared for the Middle East’s Next Battleground?” on tabletmag.com.

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