Lebanon pager attacks show new dimensions of cyber warfare

On September 17, nine people, including a young girl, were killed and over 2,800 were injured, including some critically, across Lebanon after handheld pagers used by members of Hezbollah to communicate exploded. Photographs of the attack were soon flooding social media.

Iran’s Ambassador to Lebanon was among the people who were wounded by the simultaneous blasts in the capital Beirut and several other places.

Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, said the pagers belonged “to employees of various Hezbollah units and institutions” and confirmed the deaths of eight fighters. The group blamed Israel for what it called a “criminal aggression” and vowed that it would get “just retribution”.

Hezbollah said an unspecified number of pagers, which the group relies on heavily for communications due to the risk of mobile phones being hacked or tracked, exploded at around 15:30 local time (18:00 IST). The wave of explosions lasted around an hour after the initial detonation.

The Israeli military did not comment on the pager explosions but said the Chief of Staff, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, had held a situational assessment with commanders “focussing on readiness in both offence and defence in all arenas”.

Background

A day after the October 7 incident, Hezbollah began attacking Israel from Lebanon using various rockets and missiles. This resulted in the displacement of a large number of Israelis from Northern Israel bordering Lebanon. Hezbollah has been stating that it is acting in support of Hamas, which is also backed by Iran.

Hours before the explosions, Israel’s Security Cabinet had said that stopping Hezbollah attacks on the north of the country to allow the safe return of the displaced 60,000 residents was an official war goal.

The Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, during a meeting with US envoy Amos Hochstein on September 16, stated that the only way to return the Northern residents was through “military action” and “the possibility for an agreement is running out as Hezbollah continues to ‘tie itself’ to Hamas and refuses to end the conflict”.

Since October 8, it is reported that at least 589 people have been killed in Lebanon, the vast majority of them Hezbollah fighters. On the Israeli side, 25 civilians and 21 members of security forces have been killed.

The Visuals

A CCTV video in a supermarket showed an explosion in a man’s pocket; he is then seen falling backwards to the ground and crying out in pain as other shoppers run for cover.

As per reports, ambulances were still rushing to hospitals hours later, overwhelmed with the number of casualties, 200 of whom the Lebanese Health Minister said were in a critical condition, while relatives were waiting outside in the hope of receiving updates.

The LAU Medical Centre in Beirut’s Ashrafieh District closed its main gate and was limiting the number of people getting in. “It’s very sensitive, and some scenes are horrific,” as per the BBC.

Most of the wounds were at the level of the waist, face, eyes, and hands, he said, adding, “A lot of casualties have lost fingers, in some cases all of them.”

The wife of Iranian Ambassador Mojtaba Amani said he was “slightly injured” by one of the explosions and that he was “doing well” in the hospital. Though there are reports that the Ambassador’s injuries were more serious than initially reported and that he would be evacuated to Tehran for treatment.

The son of Hezbollah MP Ali Ammar and the daughter of a Hezbollah member in the Bekaa Valley were among those killed, as per reports. While the son of another lawmaker, Hassan Fadlallah, was wounded.

14 people were also wounded by exploding pagers in Syria, where Hezbollah is fighting alongside government forces in the country’s civil war, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Lebanon’s Crisis Operations Centre, which is run by the Health Ministry, asked all medical workers to head to their respective hospitals to help cope with the massive numbers of wounded coming in for urgent care.

Health Minister of Lebanon, Firass Abiad, said on the evening of September 17 that health officials were beginning to direct the injured to medical facilities outside of Beirut and its southern suburbs, where hospitals are overwhelmed.

One of those hospitals, the American University of Beirut Medical Centre, said earlier that it had received more than 160 “seriously injured” people in the span of three hours.

The World Health Organisation said it was assisting hospitals in Lebanon and providing supplies because many health facilities were at capacity with injured patients. The UN’s public health agency described the situation as an “emergency,” according to a statement.

Imagination Knows No Bounds

Imagine knowing that a particular batch of pagers manufactured by one company has been ordered by Hezbollah and thereafter putting a small amount of explosive in each device. Thereafter, possessing the technology to create a virus that heats up the device at a particular time, causing the lithium batteries to overheat and explode.

The attackers would have needed to work with the manufacturers of either the devices or of a particular component of the devices to be able to implement this. Further, it opens up endless possibilities of targeting mobile phones, laptops, and other electronic devices in the future.

As per a report, the devices were of Taiwan-based Gold Apollo. However, Gold Apollo founder Hsu Ching-Kuang said the pagers used in the explosion were made by a company in Europe that had the right to use the Taipei-based firm’s brand, the name of which he could not immediately confirm.

“The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it,” is what he told reporters, without naming the company which did make the devices.

The senior Lebanese security source identified a photograph of the model of the pager, an AP924, which, like other pagers, wirelessly receives and displays text messages but cannot make telephone calls.

There is no doubt that, like the placing of an explosive device under the bed of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, there has to be a degree of complicity. But this attack no doubt raises serious concerns regarding the security at the manufacturing plants and a larger net of complicity, which will particularly affect those countries that rely more heavily on imported components from manufacturing plants where security concerns loom.

Supply chain attacks will now be a concern in the security world as hackers gain access to products while they are in development. But these attacks were earlier focused on software. Hardware supply chain attacks are far rarer as they involve getting hands on the components.

The Wall Street Journal cited a source as saying the affected devices were from a new shipment that Hezbollah had received in recent days. A Hezbollah official also told the newspaper that some people had felt the pagers heat up before the blasts.

Overheated lithium-ion batteries can catch fire, but as per experts, hacking into the pagers and making them overheat would not usually cause such explosions.

A former British Army munitions expert, who asked not to be named, told the BBC the pagers would have likely been packed with between 10g and 20g of military-grade high explosive, hidden inside a fake electronic component. Once armed by a signal, called an alphanumeric text message, the next person to use the device would have triggered the explosive, the expert said.

As per a report quoting a Lebanese source, the devices had been modified “at the production level”. “The Mossad injected a board inside of the device that has explosive material that receives a code. It’s very hard to detect it through any means. Even with any device or scanner”. The pagers exploded when a coded message was sent to them, simultaneously activating the explosives.

Lina Khatib, a Middle East analyst at the UK-based Chatham House think tank, told the BBC: “Israel has been engaging in cyber operations against Hezbollah for several months, but this security breach is the largest in scale.”

Nicholas Blanford, a Beirut-based senior fellow of the US think tank the Atlantic Council, said: “Israel in one fell swoop has rendered combat ineffective hundreds if not thousands of Hezbollah fighters, in some cases permanently.”

Conclusion

The Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati blamed Israel for the explosions, saying that they represented a “serious violation of Lebanese sovereignty and a crime by all standards”.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said he told his Lebanese counterpart that he “strongly condemned Israeli terrorism”. While the US, Israel’s closest ally, denied any involvement and urged Iran not to heighten tensions.

There is no doubt that this is an attack that is unprecedented in the use of technology, scale, and nature and is a harbinger of modern-day warfare. It marks a new phase in technological warfare that is acquiring a form of its own.

The UN’s spokesman said the latest developments in Lebanon were “extremely concerning, especially given that this is taking place within a context that is extremely volatile”.

Hezbollah would now face extreme pressure from within to retaliate. Hence the attack marks another dangerous moment, if not the most dangerous moment in the Hezbollah-Israel conflict since October.

Undoubtedly, this is a game changer and defining moment in cyber warfare and will have reaching implications across the globe, both for those wanting to carry out such an attack and for those safeguarding themselves from such an attack.

The author is a retired Major General of the Indian Army. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.