Allison Pytlak, James Siebens & Shreya Lad
When the news first broke about a deadly series of explosions last week involving wireless communication devices against the Hezbollah group, headlines were chock full of references to cyber weapons and cyberattacks. In the confusion about the types of devices that were targeted, many initially assumed that the first round of explosions was triggered by malware, which was also assumed to have been implanted in the pagers. However, it soon became clear that cellphones had not been affected, and that Hezbollah’s reliance on such “old school” communications technology like pagers and walkie-talkies was itself a response to a perceived digital threat: that its cellphones were no longer secure and were presumed to have become tools of Israeli surveillance.
According to expert analyses by the BBC and New York Times based of the trigger mechanism used, the devices were carefully engineered to maximize physical damage with minimal quantities of explosives. The human cost of sabotaging civilian devices in this way –a common terrorist tactic used in the London car bombings, for example, or in attacks using improvised explosive devices, among others– cannot be understated. At the same time, the kinetic nature of this incident is illustrative for several reasons, all of which help to dispel the myth that problems like attribution challenges, supply chain vulnerabilities, and brief shelf lives are unique to the cyber domain or make the cyber domain itself wholly distinct from other domains of conflict.
Details are still emerging about precisely what caused thousands of pagers and, one day later, hundreds of walkie-talkies to detonate. Israel is widely assumed to be responsible. However, the cyber dimension of the two incidents appears to be less consequential than first assumed, with less speculation about the role of hacking operations and cyberattacks.
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