Israel Post cyber attack

14th Apr 2023

Upon resuming work Thursday following Pesach, we discovered that the Israel Post commercial shipping portal had been completely taken down following a major cyber attack perpetrated by anonymous enemies of the State of Israel.

Calcalist reports that no sensitive information was leaked and no damage was caused. However, when we called Israel Post technical support, they said that at present there is no timetable for resumption of service. 

Israel Post provides pickup service three times a week, on Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. We definitely won't be shipping any First Class or EMS parcels this Sunday, 25 Nissan (16 Apr.). If the portal is up and running by Monday morning, we'll be able to get shipments out on Tuesday morning. If the problem is not resolved until Tuesday or Wednesday, we'll ship on Thursday. 

We trust our customers will appreciate that this is completely beyond our control. The Israel Post portal has not crashed for more than an hour or two during the past decade, so this comes as quite a surprise. There is an uptick in anti-Israel hacking attacks every year during the month of Ramadan, and this year's targeting of Israel Post was quite sophisticated.

The unexpected cyber attack had a significant impact for some of our customers, since it comes on the heels of our week-long Passover shutdown.

Our express shipping option is handled by DHL, which has not been impacted at all, so we urge customers placing orders this week to select the DHL option is the order is time-sensitive.

For detailed shipping information, please refer to this page.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Update: Sunday, 25 Nissan (16 Apr.)

The Israel Post commercial shipping portal is now working again, sooner than expected. Based on the tracking data, it appears that the Export Bureau has a considerable backlog due to Passover and the cyber attack.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Update: Tuesday, 27 Nissan (18 Apr.)

The shipping portal continues to function without problems. Upon reviewing the tracking data over the past two weeks, we noticed that a lot of parcels got off to a slow start. Apparently the Passover holidays and the cyber attack took their toll, causing a significant bottleneck; but over the past two days we saw that many parcels started moving through the system, and we're hopeful that all of the parcels that were delayed will be out of the country by the end of this week (i.e. Thursday night).