A senior IDF officer overseeing information security has revealed the scale of leaks and espionage the military grappled with during the Iron Swords war, describing an unprecedented number of breaches that forced open dozens of security investigations, a volume the army says would normally take a full decade to accumulate.
Colonel G., the outgoing head of the IDF's information security department, presented the findings at a professional conference, describing challenges the military had never encountered before. He said the IDF effectively leaked itself, with the problem persisting and even intensifying as the war went on. Soldiers tweeted their locations in the middle of combat and posted photos from the field. He noted that issues the army believed it had already addressed through after-action reviews and lessons learned kept resurfacing every two months, as if the lessons had been forgotten as quickly as they were learned.
According to Colonel G., more than 30 security investigations were opened during the war specifically to trace the sources of these leaks, a pace of investigative activity he compared to what the army would typically see over an entire decade during routine periods. Alongside the internal leak investigations, the military also ran a parallel intelligence campaign targeting individuals working on behalf of hostile states.
The outgoing department head said the Shin Bet has arrested more than 80 people suspected of gathering intelligence from inside IDF bases. He described it as a real intelligence campaign against a genuine enemy, spies operating inside Israeli territory who were being run and directed from outside.
