Although Israel has not commented on the intelligence operation that caused thousands of pagers used by Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon to explode almost simultaneously, the attack has put a spotlight on Israel's secretive 8200 cyber warfare unit.
Here are some facts about the Israel Defence Forces' specialist cyber warfare and intelligence unit, known in Israel by its numbers in Hebrew "shmone matayim," which is part of the Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate.
- Unit 8200 is the equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency or Britain's GCHQ, and is the largest single military unit in the Israel Defence Forces. It is descended from early codebreaking and intelligence units formed at the birth of the state of Israel in 1948.
- Its activities are usually highly secret and range from signals intelligence to data mining and technological attacks and strikes.
- Some of the operations it has allegedly been involved in include the 2005-10 Stuxnet virus attack that disabled Iranian nuclear centrifuges, a 2017 cyberattack on Lebanon's state telecoms company Ogero, and the thwarting of an ISIS attack on a civilian airliner travelling from Australia to the United Arab Emirates in 2018.
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