Latest Lebanon Pager Terrorist Attack Predictable, Preventable

September 20, 2024 (NEO – Brian Berletic) – Western media is calling an indiscriminate Israeli terrorist attack across Lebanon that has killed several, including at least one child and injured thousands, “unprecedented” and “sophisticated”. Yet nothing about the attack, which reportedly involved 5,000 pagers rigged with remotely detonated explosives before distribution, was unpredictable or unpreventable.

Reuters in its article, “Israel planted explosives in 5,000 Hezbollah’s pagers, say sources,” would report:

The operation was an unprecedented Hezbollah security breach that saw thousands of pagers detonate across Lebanon, killing nine people and wounding nearly 3,000 others, including the group’s fighters and Iran’s envoy to Beirut.

The Lebanese security source said the pagers were from Taiwan-based Gold Apollo, but the company said it did not manufacture the devices, but were made by a European firm with the right to use its brand.

Reuters reported that up to 3 grams of explosives were hidden inside a batch of new pagers, exploding when “a coded message was sent to them, simultaneously activating the explosives.”

Reuters reports that the pagers originated from a Taiwan-based manufacturer, who in turn claims the devices were assembled in Europe with their permission to use their brand.

The pagers purchased by and for distribution to Hezbollah’s security, administrative, medical, relief, and adjacent networks spent the entirety of their time from manufacturing to shipment in potential enemy hands before arriving in Lebanon, exposing them to at a minimum well-documented security breaches the US and its proxies have implemented for well over a decade.

This time, the devices were transformed into remotely detonated explosives with enough energy to seriously maim or kill those holding the devices or maim and kill those located nearby.

The attack was made possible not by a lapse in security or because the threat was until now inconceivable, but only by a complete lack of relevant national and operational security policy and procedures involving the procurement of technology for official and/or domestic use versus the well-understood dangers of sourcing technology from abroad.

A Long, Documented History of Turning Tech into Ticking Time bombs

American citizen and former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden was among the first to suspect the pager attack was not the result of an Israeli “hack” compromising the batteries of the devices, but was instead the result of the devices being tampered with to include explosives either at the factory or at a shipping facility. In a September 18, 2024 post on social media network X, Snowden included photos from 2013 of NSA teams opening packages and tampering with IT devices during transit.

Snowden would comment:

I keep thinking about this Top Secret photo from the revelations of mass surveillance back in 2013, revealing how the NSA poisoned commercial shipments in transit (often at airports) to spy on the ultimate recipients. Ten years later, and shipment security never improved.

In a 2015 article, this author warned about the national security implications of depending on other nations for information technology. The article cited Popular Science mentioning a process called “interdiction,” which it describes as a process, “in which they intercept mailed goods and replace them with infected versions.”

Also cited was a 2013 Australian Financial Review article titled, “Intel chips could let US spies inside: expert,” describing a multitude of cybersecurity breaches and the likelihood that the US NSA was likely “embedding back doors inside chips produced by Intel and AMD, giving them the possibility to access and control machines.”

As far back as 2013 the risk of IT hardware manufactured abroad being compromised either in the factory or in transit was so high, nations like Russia and China began producing their own processors, operating systems, computers and other essential hardware for official work or created workflows that excluded the use of such hardware altogether.

For well over a decade, IT hardware procured from abroad represented metaphorical ticking time bombs, compromising information security. Today, because of a lack of seriousness in addressing this long-standing security flaw, IT hardware has been transformed into literal bombs.

This Time, Too Little, Too Late for Lebanon

Today, the dangers of these threats are not only more deeply understood, they have grown considerably. Even across Lebanon, modern smartphones were so regularly compromised by Israeli intelligence agencies, Hezbollah’s leadership encouraged members to discard them.

Reuters would report:

In a televised speech on Feb. 13, the group’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah sternly warned supporters that their phones were more dangerous than Israeli spies, saying they should break, bury or lock them in an iron box.

Instead, the group opted to distribute pagers to Hezbollah members across the group’s various branches – from fighters to medics working in its relief services.

While the general danger compromised IT hardware represented was understood, effective measures to protect against it were not implemented.

Discarding smartphones compromised precisely because the entirety of their hardware and software is produced abroad where the US regularly compromises both – often in cooperation with industry partners – and replacing them with pagers likewise manufactured by industry in league with or under the influence of the US and its proxies simply provided a greater opportunity to compromise Lebanon’s national security and Hezbollah’s operational security.

Taking IT Security Seriously

IT hardware and the information space it enables constitutes an additional domain of national security as important to protect for a nation as its land borders, airspace, and shores.

Just as Hezbollah, Iran, Russia, or China wouldn’t purchase crucial defense articles from the United States or its proxies – knowing such articles would be tampered with, sabotaged, or otherwise compromised, nations and organizations must also avoid purchasing the means of maintaining, using, and protecting their information space from enemies.

Hezbollah, Lebanon’s government and military, and the government, military, and essential institutions and organizations across the emerging multipolar world must as urgently establish self-sufficiency in terms of information technology as they have in other areas of national security.

The manufacturing of computers, their individual components including processors, smartphones, radios, pagers, and all other devices, as well as software and online platforms must be designed, manufactured, and/or coded by a nation itself or a trusted ally. The design, manufacturing and coding process for hardware and software used across the information domain must be overseen by experts working within the governments, organizations, and institutions acquiring information technology.

Had Hezbollah prioritized IT hardware and software as central to their organizational security and Lebanon’s national security, they would have created an entire organization dedicated to acquiring, using, and ensuring the security of this technology. Their experts would have overseen the production of the pagers they sought to replace their smartphones with, they would have overseen their transportation to end users, and the possibility of embedding 5,000 pagers with explosive devices would have been inconceivable.

In other words, purchasing IT hardware or software should be approached not as acquiring benign consumer goods, but as central to national and operational security and under the assumption that if an opportunity is provided to compromise this essential technology, potential enemies will exploit it.

How these goods are designed, manufactured, and shipped, and by whom, is of central importance. If any part of the chain of custody puts this technology into the hands of a potential enemy, it should be assumed that purchased devices or software have been compromised.

Securing the Information Domain Across the Multipolar World

While nations like Russia and China appear to be far ahead of most in terms of securing their information domain as well as the hardware and software that constitutes it, many allies and potential allies have not. Antiquated attitudes toward information space, seeing it as peripheral to national security rather than a domain of national security, has created a deep culture of complacency, ignorance, and incompetence.

The US, Israel and potentially the Taiwan-based manufacturer of the pagers (or their European partners) succeeded in carrying out this malicious, indiscriminate terrorist attack across Lebanon not because of any particular prowess on their part, and not even because of a temporary lapse in security on Lebanon’s part, but because Lebanon’s information domain remains virtually unprotected with apparently no understanding that it even should be protected let alone any effective strategy to do so.

This attack was preventable. Future attacks are preventable.

Just as Russia and China conduct more traditional forums and exercises involving the traditional domains of national defense – land, air, and sea – forums and exercises focused on defending the information domain are essential. Impressing upon nations, governments, administrations, organizations, institutions, and even individuals of the importance of information technology sovereignty, of either making this technology themselves or acquiring it from close allies, overseen themselves in a transparent process from factory floor, to transit, to distribution – eliminates the open and unguarded gate the US and its proxies exploited in this most recent attack.

Defending national security domains is already a daunting task when done properly. Information space is perhaps the most complicated and least understood of these domains. But in many cases, political and military leadership fail to understand information space is a national security domain to begin with. Changing this attitude and expanding existing joint-defense cooperation into information space is the first step toward ensuring this tragedy – at a minimum – is not as easy to repeat or as large-scale if it is attempted again.

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”