Guest Essay
Israel’s Pager Attacks Have Changed the World
Mr. Schneier is a security technologist and a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Israel’s
brazen attacks on Hezbollah last week, 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 just be 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 itself, 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 a 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.
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 itself, 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 a 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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