Thousands of pagers and other communications devices exploded in Lebanon this week, marking a new escalation in the use of supply chains against rivals, putting new urgency on global leaders to reduce their dependence on technology from rivals, according to Bloomberg.
Lebanese officials believe communications equipment was rigged with explosives in a sophisticated attack believed to have been carried out by Israel on Hezbollah's supply chain, which runs from Taiwan to Hungary.
While booby-trapped devices have been used in espionage for years, the scale and violence of the attacks in Lebanon that killed at least 37 people and injured some 2,300 others has left officials deeply concerned.
Officials worry that globalized supply chains that help produce cheap goods and fuel global growth could become weapons in the hands of foreign rivals.
“When you depend on other countries for critical inputs or technology, you give them a back door into everything you do. This is an example of how you can weaponize that dependence,” said Melanie Hart, a former senior official at the US Department of Foreign Affairs and now at the Atlantic Council.
A former senior US intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the explosions in Lebanon as just the latest and most shocking of a number of supply chain attacks taking place around the world today. Such attacks typically take years to prepare and tend to be narrowly targeted to minimize collateral damage.
Interdiction operations, in which goods are intercepted and tampered with before they reach the final consignee, are rampant, the former official said.
“Supply chain hacking is a pretty basic tool for intelligence agencies. In the past few years, we’ve seen it used primarily for information gathering, but as we’ve seen recently, it can also be used for targeted killing,” said Holden Triplett, a former FBI official.
Bloomberg points out that even using old, outdated technology is no guarantee of security, as the explosions of communication devices in Lebanon this week showed. Hezbollah uses pagers — technology from the 1990s — to avoid US and Israeli surveillance.
“Hezbollah decided to go low-tech to reduce its vulnerability, but clearly you can’t go so low-tech that you can’t escape vulnerabilities. The bottom line is that in a world with overextended supply chains, vulnerabilities are part of the system. Every organization has to buy. Vulnerabilities are a fact of life,” said Brad Glosserman, senior adviser at the research group Pacific Forum.
