The invisible war in the Middle East.
A short beep, a small explosion – Lebanon witnessed an attack that blurred the lines between conventional and electronic warfare. In an instant, it became clear: no one was safe from the new threat.
Hundreds of explosions rocked Lebanon at the same time on Tuesday evening. The target: members of the Shiite Hezbollah militia who were equipped with the pagers. The group, which is hostile to Israel, actually wanted to use the old technology to protect itself from surveillance – and became the target of a well-coordinated attack itself.
The New York Times reported, citing government officials, that Israeli agents had previously intercepted the devices and loaded them with small amounts of explosives and a code. This code was then used to detonate the devices.
Chaotic scenes were seen all over the country, the hospitals of the already ailing health system were completely overwhelmed. Many innocent people were also injured. Just one day later, numerous devices exploded again, this time walkie-talkies.
In an analysis, two authors from the International Institute for Strategic Studies describe the alleged Israeli operation as a “humiliating blow” and “a serious failure of Hezbollah in the area of operational security.” The group has since announced revenge. However, the experts say this attack was not a classic cyber attack. There are other examples of this.
The best-known case of a cyber attack on industrial infrastructure is probably still the Stuxnet virus, discovered in 2010, which sabotaged uranium enrichment facilities in Iran. The highly sophisticated computer virus targeted the centrifuges used for uranium enrichment and caused their physical destruction. Stuxnet is considered the world’s first known cyber weapon. The Israeli and US secret services were quickly suspected of being the perpetrators, and unnamed government officials later confirmed this in media reports.
As a result, Iran tightened its security measures and secrecy policy with regard to its nuclear program. Even years after the incident, which hit the Natanz complex in the center of the country, mistrust remains high. Iran’s nuclear program has long been the focus of attention after the country was suspected of having a secret nuclear weapons program. The political and religious leadership in Tehran denies this and claims that nuclear technology is only used for civilian purposes.
Since the 1979 revolution, the United States and Israel have been considered arch-enemies of the Islamic Republic. When the Gaza war broke out almost a year ago, there were repeated threats that the shadow conflict would develop into a conflagration. In revenge for the killing of a high-ranking general, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, the country’s elite armed forces, fired hundreds of drones and rockets at Israel in April in an unprecedented attack.
For years, Israeli politicians have been concerned about the threatening tone of the government in Tehran, which denies the Jewish state the right to exist. Just before the Hamas attack, Iran’s head of state Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had reiterated old threats against Israel and described the state as a cancer.
Hackers with links to the Iranian government or groups hostile to Israel also attacked targets in Israel. According to an annual report by the Israeli Cyber Directorate, the number of attacks more than doubled in the months after the outbreak of the Gaza war. The targets affected a wide variety of areas, such as government offices, hospitals or surveillance cameras. According to the report, 800 incidents were classified as having “significant potential for damage”.
Iran’s infrastructure is also regularly hit by mysterious cyber attacks. When gas stations suddenly stopped working across the country on a cold December day last year, chaos spread. Unlike in Germany, for example, Iranians fill up their cars using a special system of prepaid cards. This very network was apparently the target of a cyber attack at the time, revealing a previously unseen weakness in the infrastructure.
Around two-thirds of the country’s gas stations were affected. Iran’s government quickly blamed its arch-enemy Israel for the outage. According to the Israeli newspaper “The Times of Israel”, a hacker group called “Gondscheschk-e Darande” (Robber Sparrow) claimed responsibility for the incident. The group is said to have carried out cyber attacks on Iran’s steel industry in the past.
