A stunning two petabytes (two quadrillion bytes) of data has been hacked from Israelis in recent years, Israel National Cyber Directorate (INCD) Chief Yossi Karadi told The Jerusalem Post in an exclusive interview on Wednesday.
If there was a time not long ago when the success of hackers against cyber defenders was measured in megabytes or gigabytes of electronic data, the cyber-attacking threat has leaped multiple levels in a short period.
Before the world could get used to hacking at the level of terabytes (trillions of bytes), hackers had already broken the petabyte level.
To give the public an idea of the size of such hacks, the digital size of the entire massive National Library of Israel is only 20 trillion bytes, meaning hackers penetrated and seized the equivalent of 100 national libraries of data.
This statistic comes from a variety of hackers’ activities and data analysis points.
Karadi also presented information indicating a 35% increase in phishing cyber attacks in 2025 and a 170% jump in cyber influence attacks.
Phishing attacks involve social engineering attempts by hackers to fool a given target into clicking on a link or voluntarily providing financial information, in order to seize their funds, some of their personal data, or as a way into a larger organization’s digital infrastructure.
Cyber influence attacks are designed not to steal funds or information on their own, but rather to manipulate public opinion in a given sector, country, or series of countries, to achieve a specific policy goal.
For example, one of the most well-known cyber influence campaigns was Russia’s documented attempt to influence the 2016 US presidential election, though ultimately, investigators concluded that Donald Trump likely would have won that election anyway.
Last week, the INCD and the Shin Bet issued an update and a warning to the Israeli public that, since mid-2025, there has been a campaign of hundreds of highly sophisticated cyber attacks against Israeli government officials, security officials, academics, and media figures.
Much of the spike in cyber attacks, the INCD attributed to Iranian intelligence.
Israel is currently the third most targeted country in the world by hackers, but it is far from the only one.
In August-September 2025, the British giant Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) was hit by one of the most economically damaging cyber attacks in history at a loss of almost two billion pounds.
The hack caused a month-long production shutdown across all global plants, disrupting supply chains for up to 5,000 businesses for five weeks and requiring the British government to step in to keep JLR operating until it could catch its breath financially.
A major ongoing move Karadi is making to improve Israel’s cyber defenses is putting forth a new comprehensive cyber law to define the INCD’s powers and the private sector’s responsibilities when it comes to critical infrastructure cyber defense.
Karadi and the INCD put forward the proposed bill on January 25.
The bill would require critical infrastructure providers and government agencies to live up to a minimum of 63 different cyber defense requirements, most of which are gleaned from standards set by top cyber agencies like the US’s National Institute of Standards and Technology.
In addition, in the case of “grave” cyber threats, companies would be required to report to the INCD in real-time if they have been hacked.
The INCD chief, who took office approximately one year ago, is hoping the first reading of the bill can pass the Knesset in March, which would at least give it a shot of being adopted fully into law before the upcoming election season, which will start by mid-summer at the latest.
This is the first in a series of articles from Karadi’s interview with The Jerusalem Post.