The News
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard ordered its members to stop using pagers and other personal communication devices amid fears that recent explosions targeting Hezbollah members’ pagers and walkie talkies may be part of a larger operation aimed at Tehran and its proxies in the Middle East.
The precision and scale of the attacks in Lebanon last week underscore the vulnerabilities of personal communication devices, a security expert wrote in a New York Times essay — ranging from cyberattacks to law enforcement and government actors making compromised devices distributed to unknowing targets, as Hezbollah has accused Israel of doing.
SIGNALS
Attacks underscore risks of insecure communications in conflict zones
The concern that phones pose a risk for their owners is not exclusive to Hezbollah: In 1996 and 2000, Israel placed bombs inside cell phones to target Hamas and another Palestinian activist, a security expert noted in a New York Times column. In Ukraine, the country’s military has repeatedly targeted Russian positions using data gleaned from its soldiers’ phones, suggesting its military lacks secure means of communicating, Business Insider noted. “The cellphone is the new cigarette in the foxhole,” a US major general told Foreign Policy, adding that army trainers are increasingly warning soldiers about how dangerous phones could be during military operations.
Targeted attacks on personal devices may represent the future of warfare
The pager attacks demonstrate that Israel, which has not taken responsibility for the attack, may be able to strike “in a more discriminate and imaginative way” than through typical means, like rockets, a retired Australian army official wrote for the Lowy Institute think tank. It implies Israel’s capacity to wage a kind of personal warfare similar to the use of armed drones targeting individual soldiers in Russia and Ukraine. These types of strikes can occur far from a battlefield, the official noted, if groups “can access the personal devices of government officials or politicians.”
Law enforcement increasingly targeting encrypted devices to curb crime
International intelligence services and militaries have long targeted adversaries’ encrypted communications in methods that are being increasingly adopted by domestic law enforcement agencies. In a 2021 FBI operation dubbed “Trojan Shield,” the agency ran an encrypted smartphone company that compromised more than 10,000 organized crime members. And earlier this year, Australian police infiltrated an encrypted messaging app popular with criminals, leading to arrests in Sweden, Ireland, and Canada.