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Hack of Hezbollah Devices Exposes Dark Corners of Asia Supply Chains (msn.com) 187

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Deadly attacks using booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies in Lebanon has revealed significant vulnerabilities in the supply chains for older electronic devices. The incident, which killed 37 people and injured about 3,000, has sparked investigations across Europe into the origins of the weaponized gadgets.

Taiwan-based Gold Apollo blamed a European licensee for the compromised pagers, while Japan's Icom could not verify the authenticity of the walkie-talkies bearing its name. Both companies denied manufacturing the deadly components in their home countries. Industry executives say older electronics from Asia often lack the tight supply chain controls of newer products, making it difficult to trace their origins. Counterfeiting, surplus inventories, and complex manufacturing deals further complicate the issue.

Hack of Hezbollah Devices Exposes Dark Corners of Asia Supply Chains More | Reply

Hack of Hezbollah Devices Exposes Dark Corners of Asia Supply Chains

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  • Genius (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dskoll ( 99328 ) on Friday September 20, 2024 @01:05PM (#64803125) Homepage

    I read somewhere that the pagers were sold by a shell company controlled by Israel. This means that not only did they infiltrate Hezbollah catastrophically, but Hezbollah paid for the privilege. This was a genius-level operation.

    • Re:Genius (Score:5, Interesting)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 ) on Friday September 20, 2024 @01:14PM (#64803139)
      Yep, current theory floating around in the news is that the EU company that licensed the design from Gold Apollo is actually a Mossad shell company. Basically set themselves up as a legit mfg/distributor and used that to sell the pagers to Hezbollah. They would have been planning this for ages. Explains how they were able to get 3000+ devices ready and in Hezbollah's hands when they needed them. That would also mean they were able to build them from the ground up instead of buying and modifying existing stock.

      • Re:Genius (Score:4, Insightful)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Friday September 20, 2024 @02:28PM (#64803373) Homepage Journal

        Are you sure Mossad was really careful to make sure none of those products ended up anywhere else? Are you certain that they didn't put bombs in any other gear? And can anyone say with confidence that now it's a proven tactic, nobody else is going to try it?

        This is a massive problem for supply chains and for distribution. How much more are you willing to pay for certified chains of custody that give you confidence that thing won't blow you up?

        • But certifying the supply chain could cause prices to increase... and we can't have that!

          I can't see a Walmart ad, where the smiley face bounces around the store adding "certified supply chain!" to their price labels, getting much traction.

        • How much more are you willing to pay for certified chains of custody that give you confidence that thing won't blow you up?

          How much more is some company willing to charge for pseudo-certified chains of custody that give you false confidence? That's the really scary question.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          This is a massive problem for supply chains and for distribution. How much more are you willing to pay for certified chains of custody that give you confidence that thing won't blow you up?

          It's probably less "supply chain" and more the counterfeiting rings associated with manufacturing.

          You know, counterfeiting exists - sometimes also called third shift protection. Devices that don't pass QA and get tossed, or a secret production run of devices done using the same tooling and molds and everything, but using

        • Are you sure Mossad was really careful to make sure none of those products ended up anywhere else? Are you certain that they didn't put bombs in any other gear? And can anyone say with confidence that now it's a proven tactic, nobody else is going to try it?

          And the TSA bans pagers and radios, etc... in 3... 2... 1...

        • Israel has the right to defend itself. With intelligence operations like this has been called in our media.

      • Is wondering how many pagers got into the hands of people who weren't Hezbollah. Never mind issues with setting off explosives basically at random.

        You can bet there was a lot of civilian injuries here. Western media isn't going to cover them for obvious reasons but this was really a fucked up thing to do and is only going to keep the fighting going longer.

        That is of course the point. As soon as the fighting stops people are going to start asking why the fighting started in the first place. They're g
        • Yea they should have used missiles like every other military. No civilian injury issues with missiles.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Lehk228 ( 705449 )
          this isn't 1994 civilians don't use pagers, they use smart phones, hezbollah was using pagers because mossad was hacking and tracking their cell phones.

          • This is rsilvergun you're talking to. He's trying to wage a Butlerian Jihad. He probably has a pager on him right now.

        • Did you post this from your pager?

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Well, evil genius. There is the little problem with killing children and civilians and generally making the world a less safe place.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by LazarusQLong ( 5486838 )
        The Mossad doesn't give a rat's ass about that, as long as they aren't Israeli citizens, as far as I can tell.

        • For context, wars usually have about 50% civilian casualty ratio, which can easily go up to 90% for urban warfare. If this boils over to a war, the civilian casualty ratio will be dramatically higher than the pager/walkie-talkie operation. And it will be worse than the usual ratio, for obvious reasons.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

          • thanks for the info. I was not aware the civilian casualty rate was so high, but then again in recent years it has often seemed that far more civilians have been killed than soldiers/combatants.

            • That is largely because recent conflicts tend to have the military too close to the civilians, also battle lines move too quickly to evacuate civilians before they're in a combat zone, and rocket and artillery ranges are longer then ever (inaccurate + explosive).

              • in much of modern combat there are no traditional 'battle lines' at all, for example, in the US's recent forays into Iraq/Afghanistan you can be driving through a 'pacified' or 'friendly' village and still be attacked. This lack of traditional battle lines places civilians in harm's way, plus, the attackers frequently look just like the non-combatants, if you took away their weapons.
      • to be clear, I am in no way praising the Mossad in my previous reply to you, far from it!

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gweihir ( 88907 )

          I am clear on that. You merely stated what is likely a fact.

          • In the past, I had heard rumors that the Mossad had withheld intelligence that affected the USA as well. Not sure if those rumors are true or not, but I do have my opinions, in this case, uneducated opinions, though I try to not have those as often as possible.

            But yeah, minimizing collateral damage (what a asinine euphemism!) seems to be of very little importance to several Nations out there. And of course, as demonstrated by these actions of the past few days.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by dskoll ( 99328 )

        Hezbollah doesn't seem to have a "problem with killing children and civilians", so my sympathy for those Hezbollah people affected in those attacks is zero.

        I have sympathy for people who were collateral damage, but as far as attacks go, this one probably had the lowest ratio of collateral to intentional damage of pretty much any counter-terrorism action in recent years.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by douglasfir77 ( 6439950 )

        When Hezbollah et:al decide to stop calling for the complete obliteration of Israel, we can talk. Till then no so much.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by taustin ( 171655 )

        Yeah, the Islamic terrorists do a lot of that, the killing of children and civilians.

        There's no one involved on any side who doesn't have the blood of children on their hands.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dbialac ( 320955 )
        Nearly everyone killed were Hezbollah and their children. As an alternative, how many children and actual civilians would have died in a traditional bombing to take out one member?

      • Don't blame the Mossad for Hezbollah's wrongdoings.

      • Re:Genius (Score:4, Informative)

        by Whateverthisis ( 7004192 ) on Friday September 20, 2024 @02:17PM (#64803339)
        I mean, have you been to the middle east? Or read a news article from the last 7 decades, or the just the last 7 weeks?

        You can't call for Israel to pull punches when their adversaries not only want to A) kill everyone in Israel and regularly call for genocide against all Israelis, B) actually kidnap and murder civilians in an armed incursion, C) use suicide bombs to kill Israeli civilians on a regular basis, D) use their own people as human shields.

        There's no clean fighting in the Middle East.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by skam240 ( 789197 )

          Sure I can. Israel goes out of it's way to antagonize the Palestinians via turning a blind eye to settler attacks against them, via seizing their land to build Israeli homes on, and completely abandoning even the illusion of being involved in a peace process amongst other things. This not only empower groups like Hamas and invited horrible attacks like Oct 7 but it also pissed everyone else off living in the region inviting attacks from them as well.

          Given this, I feel perfectly fine questioning Israel's mi

      • Well, evil genius. There is the little problem with killing children and civilians and generally making the world a less safe place.

        Still it was MUCH more controlled that raining bombs or missiles to target that many terrorists.....in war you're always going to have collateral damage.

        In this case it was radically minimized.

      • Excuse me, those kids *could* have grown up into terrorists. See, like Madeleine Albright said, we feel it's worth it to secure peace and democracy.
        Now, if *other* countries do it, well, then, that's just not fair. And against peace and democracy.

      • Well, evil genius. There is the little problem with killing children and civilians and generally making the world a less safe place.

        The Israeli response is reckoned by Hezbollah internally [x.com] to have a death toll of 840 Hezbollah members to 39 non-Hezbollah casualties.

        In the last year alone Hezbollah has killed 43 Israelis with their indiscriminate rocket barrage, including very recently 12 children playing on a soccer field. And they have been a key partner of Hamas (both proxies of Iran) in smuggling in weapons and executing the attack that killed 1200 Israelis, many raped, tortured, and taken hostage, specifically targeting a music fest

    • I guess that one weakness that was exploited was that all the equipment were single sourced. That makes sense from a control standpoint however once Israel figured out the source, they could use that weakness. Someone said that a side benefit of the attacks is target identification. Anyone that has was recently injured is now suspected of being part of Hezbollah. Before, it was difficult to know who might be using a Hezbollah pager. Now Israel can figure would who visited a hospital recently due to a pager

      • I guess that one weakness that was exploited was that all the equipment were single sourced. That makes sense from a control standpoint however once Israel figured out the source, they could use that weakness. Someone said that a side benefit of the attacks is target identification. Anyone that has was recently injured is now suspected of being part of Hezbollah. Before, it was difficult to know who might be using a Hezbollah pager. Now Israel can figure would who visited a hospital recently due to a pager explosion.

        This attack looks spectacular but it really kind failed. The Israelis got something like 5000 of these pagers and a seemingly fairly small number of radios into Lebanon before (according to Israel) some Hezbolal radio nerd opened one up, found the explosives and 'they had to use the capability or loose it' (according to the Israelis). So far the casualty rate does not seem to have topped 3000 with very few fatalities and a whole lot of Hezbollah members don't seem to have been too badly injured. One of the

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It's concerning that Israel is willing to injure or kill civilians to get at its enemies in countries that it is at war with. Can you imagine if they bombed a hotel in your town where they claimed a Hezbollah "commander" was staying?

      Don't blame Lebanon for not kicking them out. Lebanon couldn't if they wanted to, and if they did it would be about 8 seconds before Israel annexed part of their country and sent settlers there.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by PPH ( 736903 )

        Can you imagine if they bombed a hotel in your town

        They bombed one where the British administrators for Palestine were headquartered. Just to destroy some documents that incriminated the WZO in terrorist attacks.

    • Could Nasrallah is the mole. He has been the one encouraging Hezbollah to ditch their mobiles in favor of Pagers for 2 years now.

    • I read somewhere that the pagers were sold by a shell company controlled by Israel. This means that not only did they infiltrate Hezbollah catastrophically, but Hezbollah paid for the privilege. This was a genius-level operation.

      If so, I would hope they set things up so they could also read/hear/whatever was being transmitted/received -- which would mean they would have known about Oct 7 in advance and/or have other intelligence. Maybe this isn't technically feasible, but if it was and they didn't do it then it was a huge missed opportunity.

    • You're celebrating indiscriminate terror bombing.

      Israel has already demonstrated, excessively, that it's willing & able to target civilians. The western press keep saying Israel bombed Hezbollah but in fact they bombed public places like markets, streets, shops, & people's homes.

      The world naturally condemns acts of terrorism, e.g. the Boston marathon terror bombing or Oklahoma City terror bombing. Bombing civilians in Lebanon will also be appropriately condemned, though probably not in wester

      • >You're celebrating indiscriminate terror bombing.

        No, that's what Hezbollah does. This was an exquisitely well targeted counter-strike with far, far fewer people harmed as 'collateral damage' than bombs and guns would have hurt.

        Hezbollah was always going to be getting ready for their next terrorist act. Now it has reduced capability to carry it out.

  • Every self-respecting organisation will now want to open and verify their purchases to see if there's no tampering being done with the hardware in manufacturing or in transit. I hope this will boost the 'repairability' factor needed. One can only verify a product if it can be opened and put together again. Like, for example, the fairphone. While this has been a human tragedy for all the victims involved, maybe there will be some positive influence on the long term?
    Yes, I'm an optimist...

  • Hey Abdul! Some guy named Shlomo Goldberg just got me a great price on pagers!
    Awesome, buy them, and make sure our technician Hyman Katzenberg takes a good look at them first!

  • Forget about cryptocurrency ledgers, the best use of a blockchain is for supply chain verification. It would be easy for each creator of the initial inputs to say where they went when they sell the item. The next company up the food chain would take inputs and make something else. If I buy a product I should be able to verify where all the inputs came from. I should be able to check that the metals didn't come from some conflict mine, that the oil wasn't from a deforested jungle, that the assembly of so

    • Re:Blockchain for supply chain (Score:4, Interesting)

      by srg33 ( 1095679 ) on Friday September 20, 2024 @04:15PM (#64803801)
      This incident is precisely one of the scenarios where blockchain fails: just don't add the explosives to the ledger then final assembly then ship. This does NOT "require multiple actors working together to commit the fraud."

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by rapjr ( 732628 )
        But it would allow tracing the supply chain after the fact to find out where the explosives might have been added. You're right that it wouldn't prevent bad things from being done, but it would make them more investigateable which could result in it being less likely to happen in the first place. If the investigators are on your tail in hours instead of months that requires a different level of operational security, which could act as a deterrent.

  • The supply chain has always been compromised by state level actors.

    Both the United States and China are known to intercept networking gear and modify it for their own purposes. Companies like Cisco, Lucent, Motorola have all had this done at various points in time. No fake manufacturers required.

    The only thing new in this case is the scale.

  • So, when are we going to get a copycat version of this and have someone claim that one of these made it to the American soil and killed an American citizen or god forbid a white American child?

  • Hezbollah's fighting strength is similar to the Army of South Africa. But it is not a nation-state. It is just a bunch of goons that shop on the internet and do not seem to have the cognizance or where-with-all to vet their suppliers. Sure technically the exploding electronics were a supply-chain issue, but most corporations and governments do a better job of vetting their suppliers. Israel not only built these things, they managed via tools like Google-Ads to convince the Hezbollah buyer they had the b

  • Deadly attacks using booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies in Lebanon has revealed significant vulnerabilities in the supply chains for older electronic devices. The incident, which killed 37 people and injured about 3,000, has sparked investigations across Europe into the origins of the weaponized gadgets

    This makes it sound like an earthquake affecting a random percentage of the populace.

    It was a targeted operation - almost certainly by Mossad - against senior members of Hezbollah, the Lebanese terrorist group.

    An internal Hezbollah memo was released by the Saudis. Their tally is 879 killed, almost exclusively (840) Hezbollah members.

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