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Ahh so a simple supply chain attack. I was thinking it might have leveraged the built in batteries. But it was always unlikely, especially in a receive-only dev
by wkat4242 2y ago
Ahh so a simple supply chain attack. I was thinking it might have leveraged the built in batteries. But it was always unlikely, especially in a receive-only device.
Still, if you have the capability of such a supply chain attack, I would imagine the rewards of silent surveillance (tracking, audio) would be of much higher value than this kind of attack where 3 out of 1000s targets were killed.
- alwa 2y agoThough what a spectacular way to draw such a program to a close. I mean that in the sense of spectacle, of gruesome theatricality, not to glorify maiming people.
- rbanffy 2y agoFear is a powerful form of communication.
- cynicalsecurity 2y ago[flagged]
- rbanffy 2y agoIt works both ways - that's how terrorist organisations operate.
- mschuster91 2y agoMost bugs can be easily found out by any competent counterintelligence team.
- wruza 2y agoThe level of competence usually correlates with how much in conflict you are not.
- wkat4242 2y agoTrue but so can explosives. Clearly they were not competent. Radio signals can be detected of course but it's possible to mitigate that a lot by only doing that at specific times and locations, or on request. And send the data out in batch. Ideally while you have the subject under observation so you know they're not monitoring for signals. The same way Volkswagen hid their engine manipulation from tests by recognising the test and adjusting parameters.
- BlueTemplar 2y agoWell, slightly off topic, but in the case of Volkswagen, everybody knew they (and other car companies) were doing it for at least a decade before the scandal blew up : car magazines were even publishing articles about it !
- ddalex 2y ago3 killed but thousands inoperative and hospitals flooded - I would expect an immediate armed escalation
- frabbit 2y ago[flagged]
- rbanffy 2y agoWe should avoid using the name of the country as a proxy for its current government. The people has nothing to do with this - this is all planned and executed under the auspices of the current prime minister and his associates. Even though the people largely supports their agenda, an action that targets three people but affects 2,700 people as collateral damage would not pass by their parliament.
- wkat4242 2y agoThe people voted for this government. I do think we can hold Israel as a country responsible. But what we can't do is blame Jewish or even Israeli people in general. Though I don't see anyone doing this. The current government is always quick to draw the antisemitism card when being criticised but I never see anyone actually doing that.
- CaptainNegative 2y agoWhy would you assume this targeted three people? I assume the most likely scenario is that the attackers targeted as many Hezbollah members as they could, and were extremely successful at it.
- rdtsc 2y agoThey were probably at the risk of being exposed and pulled the plug before the word spread.
- wkat4242 2y agoThat is indeed a possibility.
- stri8ted 2y agoGiven Israel's successful precision targeting of various senior Hezb members in recent months, I wonder if the pagers were initially used as such, but as suspicion mounted, and chances of an overhaul increased, they decided to hit the kill switch while they still could. Although as as per an WSJ article: "The affected pagers were from a new shipment that the group received in recent days"
- LegitShady 2y agoThe pagers were likely one way with a codebook for the purpose of minimizing tracking and information exposure.
- anigbrowl 2y agoWhy not both? Location data would be relatively easy to collect and forward, audio not so much (much higher storage and transmission throughput requirements for very low quality source data given the limitations of piezoelectric microphones and the fact that pagers are usually worn on belts). If you're getting GPS data, collecting people's movements for a month or three probably provides 99% of what you will ever want to know. Once the patterns have been established you're into diminishing returns territory, while the risk of discovery goes up, which would neutralize the value of the explosive attack. The strategic value of such a perfectly targeted surprise attack is massive, notwithstanding the relatively low fatality rate. Injuries are expensive and often devastating, and the psychological impact is brutal. Logistically, Hezbollah (and many other organizations, militant or not) are going to have to review and/or replace part of their communications tech. That's a massive technical disruption, a significant economic cost, and risks further exposing supply chain information. It's also going to create paranoia about many other electronic devices, poison in the food, and so on. I'm not sure about the ethics of this. If one were certain that only Hezbollah officers were being targeted then it would be an acceptable kind of asymmetric attack through a novel vector. However this also seems to have impacted quite a few civilians, and there is a claim (unverified so far) that a hospital just replaced all its pager equipment a couple of weeks ago and would otherwise have been impacted: https://x.com/SuppressedNws/status/1836080190855795092 https://x.com/SuppressedNws/status/1836080190855795092 If this happened in the US pursuant to one of the wars we've been involved in, we'd definitely be calling it terrorism and/or a war crime. It's a big strategic win for the Israelis in the short term but can hurt them two ways in the longer term. Hezbollah and other enemies of Israel will be significantly more motivated retaliate in some equally creative/unpredictable fashion, and non-aligned economic partners of Israel are likely to view Israeli products with renewed skepticism, hurting exports.
- tptacek 2y agoIt would be a bit rich for us to call this a war crime, since our standard M.O. for targeted strikes --- like everybody else's --- routinely kills innocent civilians in much larger numbers than this.
- 2y ago
- ajb 2y agoIt's possible that they expected a higher kill rate. It's also possible that the kill rate will turn out to be higher after the consequences of injuries have time to play out.
- FrustratedMonky 2y agoFor a supply chain attack. How did they make sure a large percentage ended up in the hands of the targets? Seems like this could hit a lot of random people, just anybody using pagers. Unless they had way to target certain customers.
- volkl48 2y agoI think you're assuming that all pagers of this model were being sent out like this. That's unlikely. Much more likely is they compromised someone in Hezbollah that was doing the ordering, or the distributor/vendor they ordered from, modified a couple thousand devices and sent them pretty much directly to their enemy, and only their enemy, to distribute among themselves. Then waited a bit, and set them off.
- loodish 2y ago> I would imagine the rewards of silent surveillance (tracking, audio) would be of much higher value than this kind of attack where 3 out of 1000s targets were killed. The reason they were using pagers, as opposed to phones, was to avoid exactly this kind of potential attack. Pagers are (typically) a broadcast technology, the pager has no transmission capability. A page is broadcast from every tower, it has no idea where the receiver is. A targeted page is done by the receiver filtering out and ignoring pages that it isn't the recipient for (eavesdropping all pages is trivial). The pager device is simple, it doesn't contain a GPS or have any concept of it's own location. No microphone or audio capability, very little processing capability. And adding such capability with something like a bug would be reasonably apparent to anyone opening one up and inspecting it.
- maxden 2y agoThey will now need to change over to a new or backup communication system, with both the changeover and new platform bringing risks.