In an interview with The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday, Israel National Cyber Directorate (INCD) Chief Yossi Karadi said that hackers have stolen an astonishing two petabytes of information from Israelis in recent years, an amount equal to two quadrillion bytes.

Successful cyberattacks went from being measured by megabytes to gigabytes to terabytes — which are trillions of bytes. The leap from that to petabytes is enormous. To understand the scale of information that was stolen, Israel’s National Library holds 20 trillion bytes of digital data. Two petabytes is the equivalent of Israel’s National Library multiplied by 100.

Karadi also said that Israel saw an increase of 35% in phishing attacks and 170% in cyber influence attacks. Phishing attacks occur when someone tries to trick you into giving up personal information so they can steal your money. Cyber influence attacks are different. Governments sometimes engage in them to shape narratives in other countries that can help influence policy.

Last week, the Shin Bet and the INCD cautioned the public about the rise in these incidents since mid-2025, including a cyber influence campaign targeting Israeli government officials, security officials, academics and members of the media that has been tied to Iranian intelligence.

Israel is the third most targeted country in the world, but a campaign targeting a British auto company cost two billion pounds, grinding operations to a halt for more than a month and affecting 5,000 businesses, forcing the government to step in to help the company until it could get back on its feet.

Karadi and INDC proposed a new law in January that would add safety regulations that companies must abide by, such as cybersecurity safeguards, and that would require companies to notify the INDC when they’ve experienced a cyberattack.