Secret opinion by Forbes contributor :Inside Israel's Secret Startup Machine

Inside Israel's Secret Startup Machine

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 CONTRIBUTOR

I'm the Contributing Editor of Investigations for Forbes magazine  

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

This story appears in the May 31, 2016 issue of Forbes. Subscribe

Even in the hallowed annals of teenage hackerdom, this never-before-told story might top them all. In the early 1990s Avishai Abrahami found himself, as required for most Israelis when they graduate from high school, enlisting in the Israel Defense Forces. But Abrahami had been assigned to a division he wasn’t allowed to speak of, not even to his parents–a crack cybersecurity and intelligence team known as Unit 8200.

He was given an assignment that seemed right out of Mission: Impossible. Break into the computers of a country that remained in a state of hostility with Israel. The task contained several hurdles: First, figure out how to get into those computers; second, how to crack the encryption; and finally, the monumental challenge, how to access the “enormous amount” of computing power necessary to decrypt the data.

So here’s what Abrahami did once he thought he could breach the targeted computers: He broke into the computers of two other hostile countries and hijacked their processing power to suck out the data held by the first target. A masterwork of spycraft–and a primitive precursor to cloud computing–done without leaving his chair in Tel Aviv.

“If we had to do it with a computer researcher,” says Abrahami, “it would have taken us a year. It took us a day. I’m trying to think what would have happened if someone had discovered it, what a crisis that would have created.”

But (until now) no one ever did. Which is consistent with a unit whose existence, until roughly a decade ago, had never even been publicly acknowledged or identified.

The public did, however, hear about Abrahami, who’s now 45. After leaving Unit 8200, he cofounded Wix, currently one of the world’s leading cloud-based Web-development platforms.

“Just from my generation, there are more than 100 guys from the unit that I personally knew who built startups and sold them for a lot of money,” Abrahami says. “There was a team of ten people in one room in the unit. I call it the magic room, because all of them created companies where the average market cap is a half-billion dollars.” Abrahami did his part: Wix’s market cap sits at $1 billion.

Source: Forbes