The Octopus Cyber Warfare?
What Is Lebanon Cyber Warfare?
20 September 2024
Bachir El Nakib Founder Compliance Alert
The new face of Cyber Warfare attacks against Lebanon reveals "Rise of cyber warfare: The growing threat of cyber-attacks in modern conflicts"..
In an era where mobile phones and apps, let alone encrypted communication platforms are available at a widespread, it may look quite odd that Hezbollah is relying on pagers; however, it is not as simple as it seems when the existence of operational security in modern day warfare is considered. End-of-live hardware frequently escapes the attention paid to the sophisticated mechanisms used to protect contemporary devices. In this case, the attackers took full advantage of this very assumption and made a simple and rather harmless gadget into a lethal instrument. Though pagers are now archaic in the general scheme of things involving cyber wars and network penetrations the weakness that has been demonstrated in this area has led to huge losses of lives and interruption of business.
Thus, the case of changing pagers into improvised explosive devices demonstrates that such devices may contain unknown negative capabilities even when someone considers them obsolete. While cyber warfare has been mostly defined by stealing confidential information, spying, or making main facilities dysfunctional. What has been observed today is the Transformation where cyber threats are expressed in the form of physical impact. While this attack focuses on Hezbollah and its operational environment in Lebanon, the strategic innovation demonstrated here should be of concern to far more people. It opens up an unsettling question: It only takes thinking outside the box when it comes to weaponizing something as simple as a pager; just imagine what could be done with other more developed and sophisticated technologies such as today’s smartphone or other Internet of Things devices.
Considering today’s smartphones, pagers look like simple devices that have nothing to do with today’s communication tools; with today’s smartphones being orders of magnitude more complicated, featuring larger batteries, intricate circuits, and numerous sensors. They are becoming more essential in warfare and civil use; hence can be used as a marker in the future cyber war. Battery of these smart phones have a power, therefore there will be severe implication if battery of a smart phone is averted. Consider the havoc that could be achieved if and when hackers get their hands on the coup de grace and are able to wirelessly detonate reactions in phones or other contemporary appliances as seen in the case of Hezbollah’s very effective pagers.
This particular episode therefore have underlined the need to safeguard not only information but the physical systems in the communication devices. Although traditional Cyber security has been about protecting the networks, information and privacy, it has dawned on many that the next level is about protection against physical effects that could be instilled via cyber activity. There is no clear line between the real and the virtual world anymore and this attack on Hezbollah might be only the first warning of even more lethal mixed threats. As for the recent pager explosions, there have been many analysts saying that this is another form of actual aggression by Israel in the cyberspace heading toward Hezbollah. The time factor together with the size indicates that it was a well-coordinated plan which targeted to neutralize Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon. To date, the Israeli authorities have not made any public reaction to this Cyber attacks ; however, it appears that this operation belongs to a series of Israeli operations that use both non-physical and physical force. Both times, Israel was one of the main parties that apply cyber capabilities in operations against the enemy; it is aimed at disrupting their activities. The approach that was employed against Hezbollah’s pagers exemplifies a further development in Israel’s capacity to both disrupt an enemy’s command-and-control system and injure them at the same time by leveraging their technology.
Hezbollah’s pagers’ attack provides deep understanding to war technology, evolution, as well as its future development. Up until recently, the concept of cyber warfare has been associated with comparatively low levels of destructiveness to achieve kinetic goals of non-crucial character, primarily involving espionage, and data theft or infrastructure disruption. However, the ability of cyber-attacks capable of causing physical harm is of a different level entirely. With this kind of conflict, or ‘war’, where the boundaries between the computer network arena and the physical battle space are very much in debate, the new complication for strategists and politicians is…the latter. Don’t worry, the threats originating in the digital world are no longer virtual as they used to be – they are very capable of causing instantaneous real-world effects.
As well, there is a need to understand such previous forms of communication equipment like the pagers, which are relatively older to anyone — they are quite vulnerable. In most discussions on cybersecurity it is very common to hear about the protection of new sophisticated systems – here we see that very old but very formidably armed systems put up a show as for the carrying out of this attack, it is a very significant statement about the effectiveness of ‘cyber terrorists’ or ‘hackers’ that they have managed to crack into a system as old as this one. Nowadays, when people use pagers thinking of the 1980s and 1990s as the time of their dominance, one should mention that those devices can act as powerful weapons in the course of a war if properly influenced. Maintaining such primitive systems must have been Hezbollah’s way of avoiding the notice of complex cyber warfare, but in so doing they fell right into the traps set for them.
More than the mention of the death toll and other damage, the pager explosions point to even bigger issues with regard to cyber war. What does this mean for the systems that we have in more modern times which are a lot more developed? Smartphones, drone, the Internet of Things (IoT) devices are already part of the society today. All these technologies, if attacked, could cause even bigger calamities or disasters. The pager incident indicates that the threats in the sphere of the cyber-physical attacks are much more versatile than previously considered. And so it is in an era where it seems almost all structures are linked, the effects of the failure of communication devices can be seriously as deadly not only to the military but also to the civilian population.
The Hezbollah pager explosions are not a mere case of episode, but a precursor of the future era wars. They describe how cyber warfare can progress into something a lot more lethal than hacking and spying. While the battle space between cyberspace and traditional physical domains blurs more and more, the consequences for the nations’ security, the military tactics, and civilians will be keen-felt. The concepts that need to be reviewed in light of this attack are not merely the issues of cybersecurity but the issues of security of people and their belongings in the world where everything is online and interconnected.
What's Cyber Warfare
Cyber warfare is usually defined as a cyber attack or series of attacks that target a country. It has the potential to wreak havoc on government and civilian infrastructure and disrupt critical systems, resulting in damage to the state and even loss of life.
There is, however, a debate among cyber security experts as to what kind of activity constitutes cyber warfare. The US Department of Defense (DoD) recognizes the threat to national security posed by the malicious use of the Internet but doesn’t provide a clearer definition of cyber warfare. Some consider cyber warfare to be a cyber attack that can result in death.
Cyber warfare typically involves a nation-state perpetrating cyber attacks on another, but in some cases, the attacks are carried out by terrorist organizations or non-state actors seeking to further the goal of a hostile nation. There are several examples of alleged cyber warfare in recent history, but there is no universal, formal, definition for how a cyber attack may constitute an act of war.
7 Types of Cyber Warfare Attacks
Espionage
Refers to monitoring other countries to steal secrets. In cyber warfare, this can involve using botnets or spear phishing attacks to compromise sensitive computer systems before exfiltrating sensitive information.
Sabotage
Government organizations must determine sensitive information and the risks if it is compromised. Hostile governments or terrorists may steal information, destroy it, or leverage insider threats such as dissatisfied or careless employees, or government employees with affiliation to the attacking country.
Denial-of-service (DoS) Attacks/
Offensive electronic attack activities "are generally conducted at the request and onset of friendly force engagement of the enemy. In many cases, these activities suppress a threat for only a limited period of time."
Examples of offensive electronic attacks include —
Jamming enemy radar or electronic command and control systems.
Using antiradiation missiles to suppress enemy air defenses (antiradiation weapons use radiated energy emitted from the target as their mechanism for guidance onto targeted emitters).
Using electronic deception techniques to confuse enemy intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems.
Using directed-energy weapons to disable an enemy's equipment or capability.
DoS attacks prevent legitimate users from accessing a website by flooding it with fake requests and forcing the website to handle these requests. This type of attack can be used to disrupt critical operations and systems and block access to sensitive websites by civilians, military and security personnel, or research bodies.
Electrical Power Grid
Attacking the power grid allows attackers to disable critical systems, disrupt infrastructure, and potentially result in bodily harm. Attacks on the power grid can also disrupt communications and render services such as text messages and communications unusable.
Propaganda Attacks
Attempts to control the minds and thoughts of people living in or fighting for a target country. Propaganda can be used to expose embarrassing truths, spread lies to make people lose trust in their country, or side with their enemies.
Economic Disruption
Most modern economic systems operate using computers. Attackers can target computer networks of economic establishments such as stock markets, payment systems, and banks to steal money or block people from accessing the funds they need.
Surprise Attacks
These are the cyber equivalent of attacks like Pearl Harbor and 9/11. The point is to carry out a massive attack that the enemy isn’t expecting, enabling the attacker to weaken their defenses. This can be done to prepare the ground for a physical attack in the context of hybrid warfare.
"Cyber warfare can take many forms, including hacking into enemy state computer systems, spreading malware, and launching denial-of-service attacks. Entire towns and cities could be cut off from information, services and infrastructure that has become essential to the way we live such as electricity, online banking systems and internet, if a cyber threat is able to infiltrate the right systems."
Cyber Warfare history conflicts
In 2010, Stuxnet was used to inflict physical damage on an enemy’s industrial systems. It was, reportedly, used against Iran’s nuclear program. In March 2014, Russia levied a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on Ukraine and also crippled Ukraine’s election commission.
In 2015, Chinese hackers stole millions of records from the United States’ Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Also, in 2017, weaponized ransomware NotPetya was used to attack Ukraine.
Russia-Ukraine cyber warfare in 2022
The Russia-Ukraine crisis began in February 2022, and the war is also now happening in the cyber world. FortiGuard Labs observed new viper malware being used to attack Ukrainian targets and installed on at least several hundred machines across Ukraine. Several Ukrainian organizations have also succumbed to attacks that employed the KillDisk and HermeticWiper malware strands, which appear to destroy data on devices.
Additionally, a copy of Remote Manipulator System (RMS), a utilities software tool that enables remote control of devices, was being distributed in Ukraine via fake “Evacuation Plan” emails.
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