The changing nature of global warfare

Solly Rakgomo | Wednesday October 2, 2024 11:01

While Hezbollah officials suggested malware might have caused the explosions, cybersecurity experts propose a simpler explanation; an old fashioned booby bait. Whether it is this specific approach, this particular cyber attack could be cited as a classic example of how the cyber and the physical principles of warfare are converging in today’s conflict. Far more mind-boggling is the fact that these explosions were through a form of communication technology that is increasingly seen as archaic. This attack, that could be the work of Israel, opens up a new chapter in cyber warfare that could go way beyond the current event.

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 weaponising 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 (IoT) 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 has underlined the need to safeguard not only information but the physical systems in the communication devices. Although traditional cybersecurity 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 neutralise Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon. To date, the Israeli authorities have not made any public reaction to this cyberattack. 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 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.