This is not a joke: The Air Force simulated an alien attack

Soldiers of the IDF’s technology unit "Ofek", simulated a scenario of an alien attack on IDF's cyber systems. "The soldiers tried to gather intelligence on the spacecrafts in order to progress in their mission," Air Force officials said. The objective: Understanding the system’s weaknesses

Feb 23, 2015, 05:00PM | Ateret Horowitz

The Israeli Air Force simulated last night (Sunday) an alien attack. No, this is not a joke, rather part of a drill in the framework of training IDF’s technological unit “Ofek”. The soldiers learned the importance of protecting cyber systems, through tampering with alleged spacecrafts technologies. The main goal of the drill: saving the world from an alien attack.

According to IDF’s website, programming and developing teams tried to break into computer systems in order to "get into the enemy's shoes" for a day. One of the objectives was to make the software developers understand and identify potential weaknesses in the systems they have developed, through personal experience.

The simulation participants develop programming software on a daily basis, therefore the objective of the drill was to help them understand the importance of protecting their software. We decided to adapt the simulation for the “Y Generation” who like to be challenged and therefore we chose this specific scenario.  

Head of IDF’s Cyber field, Major Gil, said: “The two simulation teams competed with each other on breaking into the systems which we have built especially for this matter. At the same time, they tried to gather intelligence on the aliens and their spacecrafts in order to progress with their mission. If we were to equivalent the drill to reality, we wanted the soldiers to understand how important it is maintain confidentiality regarding professional materials they work with. 

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