Addressing an international conference on terror, Shin Bet Director Nadav Argaman said that his agency has prevented 250 terror attacks in 2018, The Jerusalem Post reported Wednesday.

Argaman said that among the prevented terror attacks were significant ones including suicide bombings, kidnappings, and shootings.

Argaman credited his agency’s success in preventing attacks by its new ability to analyze big data to identify potential lone wolf attackers in ways that were impossible before. During the two years of his tenure as the head of Israel’s internal security agency, Argaman said that the percentage of the agency’s workforce devoted to technology has risen from single digits to about 25%.

The Shin Bet, according to Argaman, is seeking to find the right balance between its use of traditional human intelligence gathering programs and its newer cyber intelligence gathering strategies.

In addition to organizational efforts, the Shin Bet director credited “strategic cooperation with our international partners in Israel and overseas as well as with the Israeli hi-tech community and other civilian bodies” for the agency’s successes.

Testifying before the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee last December, Argaman said that the security service had thwarted more than 400 terrorist attacks in 2017, including 13 planned suicide attacks, eight kidnappings and 1,100 potential lone-wolf attacks.

In 2016, the Shin Bet said that it had prevented 344 terror attacks.

The agency’s numbers include not just arresting perpetrators on their way to commit terrorist acts, but also warning individuals who made threats not to follow through on their plans.

[Photo: Haaretz הארץ / YouTube ]