Israel’s brazen attacks on Hezbollah last weekkitty online casino, in which hundreds of pagers and two-way radios exploded and killed at least 37 people, graphically illustrated a threat that cybersecurity experts have been warning about for years: Our international supply chains for computerized equipment leave us vulnerable. And we have no good means to defend ourselves.
Though the deadly operations were stunning, none of the elements used to carry them out were particularly new. The tactics employed by Israel, which has neither confirmed nor denied any role, to hijack an international supply chain and embed plastic explosives in Hezbollah devices have been used for years. What’s new is that Israel put them together in such a devastating and extravagantly public fashion, bringing into stark relief what the future of great power competition will look like — in peacetime, wartime and the ever expanding gray zone in between.
The targets won’t be just terrorists. Our computers are vulnerable, and increasingly so are our cars, our refrigerators, our home thermostats and many other useful things in our orbits. Targets are everywhere.
The core component of the operation, implanting plastic explosives in pagers and radios, has been a terrorist risk since Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber, tried to ignite some on an airplane in 2001. That’s what all of those airport scanners are designed to detect — both the ones you see at security checkpoints and the ones that later scan your luggage. Even a small amount can do an impressive degree of damage.
The second component, assassination by personal device, isn’t new, either. Israel used this tactic against a Hamas bomb maker in 1996 and a Fatah activist in 2000. Both were killed by remotely detonated booby-trapped cellphones.
The final and more logistically complex piece of Israel’s plan, attacking an international supply chain to compromise equipment at scale, is something that the United States has done, though for different purposes. The National Security Agency has intercepted communications equipment in transit and modified it not for destructive purposes but for eavesdropping. We know from an Edward Snowden document that the agency did this to a Cisco router destined for a Syrian telecommunications company. Presumably, this wasn’t the agency’s only operation of this type.
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