Over the past weekend, Israel’s National Cyber Directorate thwarted numerous attempts to establish websites that impersonate official government ministry websites, including the gov.il website, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website, the Population Authority website, as well as security agencies, including the Mossad and the National Cyber Directorate. The sites were exposed in recent days by the startup company “Malenta AI” in the early stages of establishment and were quickly removed through joint efforts of the National Cyber Directorate and relevant agencies, so they did not have time to be distributed and exposed to the public, and the damage was avoided.

The impersonating sites attempted to imitate the appearance of the official websites of these agencies to a high degree of compatibility and therefore could have appeared particularly trustworthy. However, from another inspection of the website address, it can be identified that these are impersonation sites. Some of the sites were established for the purposes of phishing and stealing private and financial information. Some are estimated to have been established for deception or to plant malicious software.

The Directorate emphasized that the sites are not live, but attempts to establish fake sites continue all the time.