Unit 8200: Israel’s cyber spy agency

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/69f150da-25b8-11e5-bd83-71cb60e8f08c.html

By John Reed
FT.com
July 10, 2015

In a searingly hot afternoon at a campuslike new science park in Beer 
Sheva, southern Israel, I watched as a group of bright, geeky teenagers 
presented their graduation projects. Parents and uniformed army personnel 
milled around a windowless room packed with tables holding laptops, phones 
or other gadgets. There was excited chatter and a pungent smell of 
adolescent sweat.

This was a recent graduation ceremony for Magshimim (which roughly 
translates as “fulfilment”), the three-year after-school programme for 16 
to 18-year-old students with exceptional computer coding and hacking 
skills. Magshimim serves as a feeder system for potential recruits to Unit 
8200, the Israeli military’s legendary high-tech spy agency, considered by 
intelligence analysts to be one of the most formidable of its kind in the 
world. Unit 8200, or shmone matayim as it’s called in Hebrew, is the 
equivalent of America’s National Security Agency and the largest single 
military unit in the Israel Defence Forces.

It is also an elite institution whose graduates, after leaving service, 
can parlay their cutting-edge snooping and hacking skills into jobs in 
Israel, Silicon Valley or Boston’s high-tech corridor. The authors of 
Start-up Nation, the seminal 2009 book about Israel’s start-up culture, 
described 8200 and the Israeli military’s other elite units as “the 
nation’s equivalent of Harvard, Princeton and Yale”.

With a female IDF minder at my side, I listened as the teenagers described 
their projects. More than half were boys but there were girls too, and 
8200 is open to both. Omer, 19, had designed a USB key that can suck 
information out of one computer and organise it on another: essentially, a 
hacking tool. “We made it appear like a keyboard so you can infiltrate any 
company in the world,” he told me. “It’s a proof of concept.”

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