The Battle for Your Computer

CHAPTER 9From Crisis to Crisis—Israeli Cyber Grows Up

“What have we done to ourselves?” Assaf Rappaport asked himself as he watched the news in shock in March 2020. A new and mysterious virus had started spreading from China, striking major cities around the world. Governments were imposing strict lockdowns from New York and Italy to Israel. Many businesses were closing their shutters and sending workers home on unpaid leave, and nobody knew for how long. And that was exactly when Rappaport and a couple of friends had walked out of Microsoft, where he had worked as the director of its Israeli development center, with the aim of embarking on a new adventure and building their own startup. “We've just founded a startup with the worst possible timing,” Rapaport thought to himself. But his feeling of hopelessness quickly proved misplaced.

Rappaport's cybersecurity and technology journey began during his military service. “Before the army, I'd never written a single line of code. I wasn't interested in computer science at all,” he recalls. But the army would soon whip him into shape. Rappaport won a spot in the prestigious Talpiot program, which aims to find the most outstanding youngsters and turn them into the next generation of managers of the military's R&D systems. He chose to study computer science and was assigned to Unit 8200, and then to Unit 81. After nine years in the IDF, he was released back into civilian life. “I dreamed of being the commander of Unit 81, but I felt ...