Comment by torginus

Comment by torginus 3 days ago

Honestly just slept on the thing and the story seems even more surreal to me now.

How come they needed to replace their pagers AT ONCE recently? Has there been some great breakthrough in pager technology? I have a 5 year old phone and no desire to replace it for at least a couple years more.

How come everyone had the EXACT same model? Even if the Israelis didn't compromise it, even the most incompetent intelligence agency would notice somebody ordering thousands of an item with an usual order count of zero.

Anyone with a very basic knowledge of supply chain attacks knows you don't buy just one kind of item. If they bought fifty different kinds of pagers, this attack would've been impossible.

I'm sure even in benign cases, placing an order of thousands of items on some niche product causes a lead time of months/weeks. Never mind that the Israelis had to painstakingly modify every single one under the cloak of secrecy. Didn't that raise any flags?

And after they did order thousands of the same item, they didn't bother opening up even a single one?

Honestly I don't think incompetence could explain this, I'm 99% sure Hezbollah is compromised at a high level.

gamer191 3 days ago

> How come they needed to replace their pagers AT ONCE recently?

Hezbollah recently switched to using only pagers for communication, because they were worried about Israel hacking their phones. It's likely they all bought pagers at the same time because of that, because I doubt any of them would have owned pagers already

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Sammi 3 days ago

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timcambrant 3 days ago

I agree with all of your questions. But covert organizations fall victims for this type of vulnerability all the time. Operation Trojan Shield and the ANOM network is one example. Operation Firewall and the ShadowCrew takedown was another. I believe LulzSec was taken down by bad opsec in the internal IRC channel as well. Bin Laden wasn't able to mix up his use of couriers and locations enough to stay hidden forever. It's easy for us to see the mistakes and point out that the criminals should have been more diligent or mixed up their operations more, but that would take more effort than anyone can consistently give over time.

Operational security is really hard and requires constant dedication which most organizations can't keep up over time. Eventually the most professional organizations will slip up and make some of the mistakes you point out above. It's very likely that someone has spies or informants inside organizations such as Hizbollah and Hamas. But this can also have been a lapse in standard operations that was finally detected and exploited by Mossad after actively watching for a long time.