UAE, Israel battle computer hackers together with ‘Crystal Ball’ platform

TEL AVIV, Israel – Fighting computer crime together has helped reinforce ties between the United Arab Emirates and Israel since they signed a normalization agreement almost three years ago, the UAE’s head of cybersecurity, Mohamed Al Kuwaiti said.

Visiting Tel Aviv last week for the annual Cyber Week conference, Al Kuwait introduced the “Crystal Ball” project, a digital platform for detecting and repelling computer attacks. Microsoft, Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and Abu Dhabi-based CPX are providing the technological backbone, and an unspecified number of countries will also participate.

“Cyberthreats do not distinguish between nations, do not distinguish between entities or people,” Al Kuwaiti said on Tuesday at Tel Aviv University gathering. “That is why we need to unite against those threats, and the Crystal Ball, that we are aiming for the whole community, will be the first step toward that.”

Al Kuwaiti, who met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday as part of a group of national cyber directors attending the conference, said the platform will enable partner countries to “easily and seamlessly share information.” The collaborative international effort will be strengthened by the combination of abilities, processing power and volume of data, he said.

The mission is to “design, deploy and enable regional intelligence enhancement” through collaboration and knowledge-sharing to combat national-level cyberthreats, according to a slide Al Kuwaiti showed during his presentation. He said the value of cooperation between the two countries was demonstrated recently when they worked together to ward off a DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack on their networks.

The UAE and Israel normalized diplomatic relations as part of the September 2020 Abraham Accords, leading to the bolstering of both commercial and strategic ties between the countries. Al Kuwaiti said the connection with Israeli tech companies has been especially helpful in his country’s transition to a digital economy.

Amid the high-level meetings, two networking organizations for information security  professionals in the UAE and Israel signed a memorandum of understanding to promote collaboration. UAE-based EliteCISOs and Israel’s Cyber Together said in a statement that they would cooperate on knowledge-sharing, professional training and cybersecurity workshops to help confront emerging threats to both countries.

The meeting with Netanyahu was held at the headquarters of the Israel Security Agency, or Shin Bet, whose director, Ronen Bar, spoke at the Cyber Week conference about the agency’s increasing use of artificial intelligence.

“The ISA and AI have one thing in common,” Bar said. “We both make a living by looking for patterns and anomalies.” He said the agency has also developed its own Generative AI tool that can be used like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Another AI innovation being tested by the ISA is an airport security system that he said would “dramatically change” the screening process before flight check-in.

“Maybe one day we will abandon the traditional favorite question for all of you: Did you pack by yourself,” he said.

Bar said the ISA is setting up a technology incubator to help startups develop generative AI products to address security and intelligence needs. He said AI will help the agency in several areas: prioritizing information; boosting intelligence capabilities by identifying patterns and deviations from patterns; becoming a tool in the decision-making process; and helping to forecast trends and the likelihood of their realization.For the agency, he said, generative AI will be a “partner” at the decision-making table, but not a “decision-maker.”

Speaking at the conference on Monday, a former Pentagon official warned that both government and business aren’t paying enough attention to AI’s potential dangers.

“I think that Israel should be very concerned about what algorithms Iran may be trying to develop or acquire overseas,” said Ezra Cohen, the former acting under secretary of defense for intelligence and security who is now vice president for corporate strategy at Oracle Corp.

“Now I’m not saying that we should be treating AI today like a nuclear weapon or anything like that, but there should be certain procedures that are put in place and I think a lot of these companies are really very juicy targets for the adversary,” Cohen said.

Multifaith gathering in Saudi Arabia positive step but acceptance of Israel remains elusive, says rabbi

A first-of-its-kind multifaith gathering that took place last week in Saudi Arabia and openly included a delegation of Jewish religious leaders was an extremely positive step, one of the participating rabbis told Jewish Insider, but should not be seen as a sign that the kingdom will soon enter into any sort of normalization agreement with Israel.

The two-day Forum on Common Values among Religious Followers kicked off in Riyadh last Wednesday – the day a Palestinian-American journalist was shot dead during clashes between Israeli forces and Palestinian militants. Hosted by the Muslim World League, the event also included leadership from the Catholic Church, Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarchate, evangelical Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as religious leaders from other countries across the Muslim world.

Rabbi David Rosen, the director of international interreligious relations at the American Jewish Committee, who was the only rabbi from Israel in attendance, called the meeting “historic,” saying it was a significant milestone for a country that portrays itself as the bedrock of Islam.

However, he also told JI that the unprecedented gathering in the heart of the Muslim world was more about changes taking place internally in Saudi Arabia — rather than about the diplomatic process taking place in the region that was sparked by the signing of a normalization agreement between Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in September 2020. Morocco and Sudan inked their own agreements with the Jewish state in the following months.

“What they are doing is for itself and its own future,” said Rosen, who has been involved in interfaith relations for decades and has visited Saudi Arabia in the past. The Saudi leadership, he added, “would love to have a normal relationship with Israel, but unless there is movement on the Palestinian front or at least a show towards a solution, there is no chance of them joining.”

Tensions between Israelis and Palestinians reached a new high last week after Shireen Abu Akleh, a veteran Al Jazeera journalist, was killed while reporting for the channel in the Palestinian city of Jenin. The Palestinian Authority and the channel have blamed Israel for Abu Akleh’s death. Israel has expressed sorrow at her death but also cast doubt on its culpability and called for an investigation into the incident. 

However, images of Israeli police attacking mourners as Abu Akleh was laid to rest on Friday afternoon also sparked anger and drew worldwide condemnation from governments, including the U.S. administration.

In Saudi Arabia, however, Rosen said the conference was “a transformation” in terms of Muslim-Jewish relations, adding that such a gathering in the kingdom would have been “unimaginable in the past.”

“That such a multifaith conference was hosted by Saudi Arabia, which has seen itself as a kind of Muslim Vatican and which until recently viewed any presence of other religions to be undesirable, is truly a sign of new times,” Rosen said. 

He added, “the fact that the Muslim World League, the traditional tool for exporting exclusive extremist Wahabi ideology, was the organizer of this multifaith gathering, shows how dramatically things have changed.”

He said that the delegation of Jewish faith leaders, which included liberal and Orthodox Jewish streams from the United States and Europe, was well-received, with the Muslim World League taking extra steps to ensure they had access to kosher food. The food, he said, was provided by Rabbi Jacob Herzog, who touts himself as the chief rabbi of the Kingdom Saudi Arabia and provides religious services to Jewish tourists and those there on business.  

Also present at the conference, said Rosen, were three U.S. ambassadors for religious freedom, including the current one, Rashad Hussein, who called on all religious leaders to take steps to combat the rise of antisemitism. Hussein, added Rosen, also referred to a visit made by Muslim World League’s Secretary-General Dr. Mohammad Al-Issa to Auschwitz two years ago.

Overall, Rosen said there was “a very strong sense articulated widely at the conference that this was a major breakthrough of enormous consequence for Saudi Arabia, the Muslim world and consequentially globally.”

“The atmosphere at this event had the character of a momentous celebration, which was far more important than the content of the speeches,” he noted, adding that the pluralistic sentiment of the final declaration, which called on spiritual leaders to leverage common principles and work to advance tolerance and peace, was remarkable precisely because it was issued from Saudi Arabia.