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Israel’s Pager Attacks Have Changed the World
- creer 2y agoWe keep hearing > requiring iPhones to be made entirely in the United States. > attacking an international supply chain to compromise equipment But "International" has nothing to do with it. If Lebanon had been a powerhouse of pager manufacturing, a fake reseller could have been created just the same and the pagers re-manufactured just the same. Single iPhones or cases of routers can be delayed in local transit for a touch up (through a small bribe, appeal to patriotism, theft or whatever). And remote exploits are common enough. Seems we need much more effort put into verifiability and such, in hardware and software. Secure enclaves was an idea in the right direction: there is a lot of chip budget available and some can be put into purely security features. Patch and firmware checksums. Encrypted memory path same thing. What's on the way? Retail scanner imaging and reference photos posted by the manufacturers?
- gjvc 2y agohttps://archive.is/thGqx https://archive.is/thGqx
- h2odragon 2y agoIt was a multi-year operation to get to the place where they could sell the targets the mined devices. Google hasn't got that kind of time horizon. Who is your enemy and why do they want to hurt you? Is anyone really concerned that mass market consumer devices have command detonated explosives in them already? I mean, other than the iphones?
- 34679 2y agoIsrael's official X account tweeted that they consider US students protesting Israel's actions in Gaza to be terrorists. So it is apparently incredibly easy to become the enemy of Israel without breaking any laws or hurting anyone. That should concern everyone. edit for source: https://x.com/Israel/status/1781951509070012435 https://x.com/Israel/status/1781951509070012435
- gruez 2y ago>Israel's official X account tweeted that they consider US students protesting Israel's actions in Gaza to be terrorists Source?
- 34679 2y agohttps://x.com/Israel/status/1781951509070012435 https://x.com/Israel/status/1781951509070012435
- gruez 2y agoThanks. The quoted tweet mentions "videos", and is actually a thread of multiple posts. You have to be signed in to see them, or use a nitter proxy[1]. If you look at those videos, it's clear that they're not calling the protesters "terrorists" for merely protesting, they're calling them "terrorists" for engaging in behavior such as intimidating jewish students or praising the October 7th attacks. It's slightly misleading to round that off to "protesting Israel's actions in Gaza". [1] https://xcancel.com/ShaiDavidai/status/1781927143758262389 https://xcancel.com/ShaiDavidai/status/1781927143758262389
- jedimind 2y agoNice deflection but you're arguing in bad faith. The OP is correct, since although the official Israel account is quote tweeting Shai Davidai, the most shameless zionist hasbarist on twitter, Israel's tweet is still self contained and is clearly trying to demonize and vilify the protestors as terrorists based on their "ideology" i.e. fighting back against your colonizer and oppressor is "terrorism" because any opposition to the racist colonial enterprise that is Israel has to be demonized and delegitimized by Zionists while they themselves engage in blatant terrorism. Israel's propaganda is so awful and lazy that it has become predictable. They will always hyperfocus on fringe cases, even manufacture such cases if they don't exist, in order to delegitimize the whole protest. And anyone who actually followed the protests carefully has witnessed that Zionists were the aggressors trying to intimidate anyone who opposes Israel's actions in Gaza in any shape or form. Furthermore, the "they were intimidating jewish students" narrative has become so laughable at this point because zionists perceive any opposition to Israel as "intimidating" and so they are abusing the jewish identity as a shield to protect the israeli apartheid entity from criticism. People are sick and tired of this game because they have seen zionists playing these sick and twisted mind games for decades.
- lultimouomo 2y ago> Who is your enemy and why do they want to hurt you It seems like the perfect occasion to quote Mickens' immortal words: > Basically, you’re either dealing with Mossad or not-Mossad. If your adversary is not-Mossad, then you’ll probably be fine if you pick a good password and don’t respond to emails from ChEaPestPAiNPi11s@ virus-basket.biz.ru. If your adversary is the Mossad, YOU’RE GONNA DIE AND THERE’S NOTHING THAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. The Mossad is not intimidated by the fact that you employ https:// https://. If the Mossad wants your data, they’re going to use a drone to replace your cellphone with a piece of uranium that’s shaped like a cellphone, and when you die of tumors filled with tumors, they’re going to hold a press conference and say “It wasn’t us” as they wear t-shirts that say “IT WAS DEFINITELY US,” and then they’re going to buy all of your stuff at your estate sale so that they can directly look at the photos of your vacation instead of reading your insipid emails about them. https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf
- monroeclinton 2y agoIf they are that competent then it implies they let October 7th and September 11th happen. My know-nothing take is that given the funds, lack of morals, and government support they can pull off some actions that benefit them, but let’s not act like it is more than it is.
- ss64 2y agoSurely no government would ever lie about something like that! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag
- esafak 2y agoIt would be weird if no government saw it coming. Some people clearly anticipated it: https://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=123885 https://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=123885
- hnbad 2y agoDon't confuse ruthlessness for competence. Israel does a lot of things because it knows it can get away with them. Israel is also known for spreading blatant disinformation. Occam's Razor suggests they were unprepared for the Oct 7 attack because they simply didn't see it coming even if they knew Hamas was up to something. When having terrorist organisations shoot bottle rockets at you or have their members blow themselves up is a common occurrence and your tolerance of collateral damage in your military counter-attacks is so high that you've continuously killed an order of magnitude more people in your counter-attacks every year while maintaining a much higher ratio of civilians casualties per military target, you don't actually need good intel because your mode of response defaults to "just kill 10x as many of them as they killed of us".
- jsnell 2y agoI'm curious about why you're bringing Google into this. Is there some reason you think they'd totally be running a loosely targeted mass assassination program, except that they just can't plan ahead far enough? That is such an out of the left field thing to lead with that I thought the article must have brought up this possibility somehow. But that doesn't seem to be the case either.
- h2odragon 2y agoWell I didn't wanna say "Oracle" cuz it aint healthy to piss them folks off
- jsnell 2y agoI guess I'd just then have asked the same question about Oracle. Why would you expect them to be compromising supply chains to kill people, except for their supposed limited planning horizon? It seems like an equally odd point to make of any company. We don't actually live in a cyberpunkish dystopia of sovereign corporations. While it's reasonable to expect large companies to have their own intelligence operations - they are huge targets, after all - I find it hard to believe that any of them would run any kind of spook field operation in general, and definitely not anything this offensive.
- h2odragon 2y agoand yet: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/ebay-hit-with-3m-fine-admits-to-terrorizing-innocent-people/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/ebay-hit-with-3m... others have made the point; we're not in a different world than we were a few months ago. the perception of the world we are, and have been in; may have changed for some. i don't have a specific reason to name a particular company as more likely than any other to be ready to deploy direct violence in pursuit of shareholder value. I speak with cynical observation that if a capability exists, someone will find a use for it.
- Electricniko 2y agoI don't know how difficult it would be to detect these in customs, but I'm thinking more of an organization posing as a fly by night Amazon/Aliexpress/Temu seller who wants to cause some chaos in a country.
- jacknews 2y agoNo way huawei etc would pull such a stunt.
- Eumenes 2y agoThis is concerning - what if Israel wants to take out one bad guy on a plane or something and views the bystanders as "collateral damage"? They blew these up in multiple countries, there is no rule of law here. This op has US state department/intelligence agencies written all over it (like the Nord stream pipeline). I suspect folks at the TSA, FAA, FTC, all over concerns over this behavior.
- tjpnz 2y ago>what if Israel wants to take out one bad guy on a plane or something and views the bystanders as "collateral damage"? They'll do it and they won't be held accountable for it.
- kylebenzle 2y agoWhat if? Minus The airliner that's exactly what Israel is doing and has been doing for the better part of 40 years. What did you think was going on? The West is moving into a region, destabilizing it, murdering all of the natives, and taking the land, there's definitely going to be some collateral damage.
- invalidname 2y ago[flagged]
- fldskfjdslkfj 2y agoBut it didn't happen, right? So maybe, just maybe, the people who did this super elaborate plan had the mental capacity to consider that option and took precautions to ensure that it won't happen?
- throw310822 2y agoDidn't they just kill about 30 thousand innocent women and children in Palestine exactly for this reason- because they happened to be near some bad guy (at least that is the excuse given)?
- dtnewman 2y agoIsrael’s pager attacks did not change the world. They merely alerted the world to the possibility of everyday devices being compromised. What is true today was still true yesterday, it just wasn’t top of mind: we have to be very careful with what we allow our adversaries to sell to us.
- saghm 2y agoPeople are a large part of the world. If enough people who weren't aware of something are aware of it now, society can react to it, and change.
- haswell 2y agoIt seems like a stretch to argue that a world in which thousands of people are simultaneously injured or killed by an electronic device they had no reason to fear is not meaningfully changed by said event. The world is in a continuous state of change, and the fact that these pager attacks are now in the public consciousness introduces a whole series of potential pathways of thought and action that wouldn’t have been explored if not for this event. This is in addition to gaining clarity about the world as it already was immediately prior to the attack, i.e. yes we were vulnerable, and an entity was in the process of actively exploiting that vulnerability. Now we're aware, and that awareness has/will initiate a new cascade of change. ETA: I'm very curious to understand how/why people disagree with this.
- eesmith 2y agoBy that definition, Covid-19 and the September 11 attacks also did not change the world. Literally the first sentence says the pager attack 'graphically illustrated a threat that cybersecurity experts have been warning about for years'.
- acdha 2y agoDid 9/11 not change the world because the idea had been made in fiction beforehand? The pager attack did change the world in two ways: the obvious one is where your point is most accurate (people becoming aware of how fragile supply chain are - just think snout what a terrorist could do with Amazon’s comingled inventory and returns!), but the other thing it did is start to legitimize this. If it’s only the Unabomber doing something, it’s clearly indefensible but as states use it other people will start to justify it on those grounds. Hezbollah is hardly a sympathetic target but I’d be shocked if someone in the region doesn’t try to attack Israelis this way saying it’s not a war crime for the same reasons.
- Qem 2y agoNow it'll probably become standard operational practice for every organization that fears such attack to separate part of its new acquisitions of everyday items and sell them in Israeli second-hand market first, before internal use, as a deterrent.
- SpaghettiCthulu 2y agoCouldn't the attacker include a geofence to mostly mitigate that threat?
- mikestew 2y agoGeofence a pager? How much extra stuff would they need to make room for in the pager in order to pull that off?
- homebrewer 2y agoProbably just check the network it's using?
- slibhb 2y agoHezbollah bought a specialty item (pagers) and many countries/companies are legally prohibited from doing business with Hezbollah. My sense is that these two facts were all but necessary for Israel to carry out this operation. So "changed the world" is hyperbole.
- tuyguntn 2y agoIDF/military buildings are near civilian areas, considering that IDF is buying bombs to kill civilians (definition of terrorism), do you think it is okay to bomb civilian buildings located near IDF buildings? I changed the word "pager" to "building"
- slibhb 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- invalidname 2y ago[flagged]
- cooloo 2y ago[flagged]
- HDThoreaun 2y agoIDF buys bombs and kills children. Source that theyre systematically targeting children?
- andag 2y agoHe... Did not say that. He said they are targeting civilians, and basic math on casualty numbers ("hamas" numbers being the same as in use by both US and IDF military intelligence) can at least tell you they're doing very little to avoid it.
- rossdavidh 2y ago"We can’t imagine Washington passing a law requiring iPhones to be made entirely in the United States. Labor costs are too high, and our country doesn’t have the domestic capacity to make these things. Our supply chains are deeply, inexorably international, and changing that would require bringing global economies back to the 1980s..." Yeah, and that's what is happening. Globalization has waxed and waned several times over the last few centuries. It is a matter of government policy, not in any sense "inexorable". It is currently waning, and will continue to do so for several decades, probably, for this reason and many others.
- _heimdall 2y ago> Globalization has waxed and waned several times over the last few centuries. This is a new one to me, you got me genuinely curious. When was there a meaningful push for globalization prior to WWII, ignoring empires trying to colonize the world?
- rossdavidh 2y agoWell I don't know that one should ignore colonialism, but there was also very much a more open free trade system prior to WW1, than there was fifty years later.
- tuyguntn 2y agoIn my eyes, this incident raises the question about every Israeli software developer and hardware developer I work with. Could they be a part of another operation, infiltrating products I work with and eventually harming the reputation of company? Possibly, yes.
- erezsh 2y agoIf your client is Hezbollah, I would say your fear is warranted.
- tuyguntn 2y agoWho is the client of Android OS, pencil, smartphones? You don't need to build specifically for Hezbollah, to start worrying about your risk factors
- hnbad 2y agoWhere do you think the line should be drawn? Arguably if your client is IDF your devices are more likely to exclusively end up in the hands of military personnel whereas if your client is "Hezbollah" (whatever legal entity acted on their behalf in this case) an attack would be (and has been) far more likely to injure, maim or kill civilians and non-militants, not just because of the higher likelihood of harming bystanders and family members. Would a supply chain attack like this against Toyota be justified because of the large market share in after-market "technicals" used by terrorist and insurgent groups?
- mardifoufs 2y agoYeah, and since most civilians in Israel are part or were part of the IDF, then the comment you're replying to is right. And according to the same logic you're using, said Israelis are totally fair game for an enemy state or organization to target and kill. If killing suspected Hezbollah fighters outside of the battlefield in civilian areas is totally fine, because they could fight Israel, then most Israeli civilians are too according to that twisted logic. I'm sure you'd have said the same if a few thousand explosive devices went off all over Israel, and Hezbollah said that it was just them targeting IDF troops.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Kwpolska 2y agoHas "Israel" been designated a terrorist state by a NATO country? No? Then nothing has changed.
- _heimdall 2y agoWhat would the practical implications of this actually be? My first thought is that NATO countries would stop selling arms or partnering militarily with Israel. Though I'm not sure if that is set in stone, the US has a habit of arming and working with groups, especially in the middle east, that either are designated as terrorist groups or act as one and are only missing the official designation.
- raxxorraxor 2y agoWhy should they? For this attack? This is probably the smartest reaction to getting attacked by missiles. Undermine their logistics and eliminate key personal. Terrorism is trying to inflict as much casualties as possible and this operation was the opposite of that. I know, this doesn't make people happy, but that has different reasons. Just implying as much as your open question,.
- zakary 2y agoWhat’s really needed is some way you can easily tell that a device has been tampered with, but which is also extremely difficult to bypass. And also where even if the OEM was in on the scheme, you could still tell. Like how a hash is used to tell if someone made changes to a piece of software. For consumer products this is a nonstarter because companies will almost never fully divulge info about all the parts of a device required for this. For defence product where almost everything is fully specified by the customer, it might be possible. If you know all the components in a device, and you can prove they are all genuine, then you can prove the whole device is genuine. Engraved hashes on every part comes to mind, but that would be ungainly to validate and fairly easy to bypass by simply copying codes from one device to another.
- acdha 2y agoThis doesn’t work because the hashes are controlled by the same party party you don’t trust. If you want this, you need to pay for trusted third-parties to audit the factory and random samples - otherwise it’s basically like all of the blockchain startups trying to reinvent supply chains only to learn that a chain of hashes showing package A was delivered to warehouse B don’t help if you don’t actually know what was in the box, who picked it up, or what happened to it in transit. I guarantee that the Mossad would have had valid hashes on every battery. This isn’t even very effective for software: people have been working on commit signing, reproducible builds, etc. for ages but it’s just a cascade of trust problems where striking the balance between workable and effective can be extremely challenging. Something like xz or SolarWinds would have had valid signatures on everything, and you still wouldn’t know the real identity of the person responsible for the duplicitous code.
- toomuchtodo 2y agoYou’re not going to easily detect supply chain tampering of code, but you might be able to detect the covert inclusion of explosives in your devices with imaging (X Ray and CT) and random sampling tear downs.
- tuyguntn 2y ago[flagged]
- invalidname 2y agoWell... Maybe you get down-voted because you write anti-semetic stuff like "In my eyes, this incident raises the question about every Israeli software developer and hardware developer I work with."... Wow.
- acdha 2y agoThat’s not anti-Semitic - it would have been if they’d said “Jewish” since “Israeli” is a question of citizenship rather than religion. If you have foreign nationals in your supply chain, it is reasonable to question how you’d know if they were subverted - for example, change “Israeli” to “Russian” or “Chinese” and ask whether you’d say there’s a legitimate possibility that their government might be coercing them. (And, of course, anyone outside of the U.S. is totally justified asking the same questions about our tech industry.)
- invalidname 2y ago[flagged]
- scarecrowbob 2y agoI know quite a few folks who consider the casual conflation of "Jewish" and "Israeli" to be antisemitic, so maybe... like...
- disambiguation 2y agoFighting terrorism with terrorism, what could go wrong? Maybe we can go back to devices with removable batteries after this.
- OutOfHere 2y agoRemovable batteries would always be welcome, but they won't fix the issue because the explosive material can still exist in the device, and it can still be triggered using the battery.