A major and unprecedented attack. On Tuesday, September 17, in the afternoon, the simultaneous explosion of pagers used by Hezbollah members in Lebanon left at least twelve dead and nearly 2,800 injured. The next day, similar scenes occurred, this time with walkie-talkies of the Shiite movement, causing at least 14 deaths and more than 450 injured. Plunging Lebanon into panic, the attacks were attributed to Israel by Hezbollah and Iran. According to the New York Timesthis operation was made possible thanks to an intervention by Israel in the supply chain of the beepers, before they reached their owners. Vice-Admiral (2S) Arnaud Coustillière, author of Soldier of cyberwar, a pioneer tells the story of French cyberdefense (Ed. Tallandier), looks back on the long and meticulous preparation that such an operation required.
L’Express: Is the operation against Hezbollah, attributed to Israel, unprecedented?
Arnaud Coustilliere: It is not conceptually new. On the other hand, it is a plan – without pronouncing on its moral or legitimate side – large-scale military. Its impact in the real world shows that a further step has been taken in the capabilities of the Israeli services. Typically, in 2007, we had suspicions of Israeli attacks against the Syrian anti-aircraft defense. They had managed to neutralize planes at the moment when a raid was passing. This time, we are facing a combined and quite remarkable operation. The cyber part is important, but there is also human infiltration. This kind of operation is quite impressively mastered. I am more impressed by their know-how than by their technology.
When you are in a military headquarters, a planning center, and you talk about cyber defense, you imagine all kinds of scenarios. The complexity of their implementation leads to choices. This is what is impressive about the Israeli plan: its success is more linked to its execution than to the technological prowess it involves. Putting an explosive in an electronic object is not a feat. On the other hand, being able to distribute the charges with sufficient precision to place them in the right objects is a real feat. This shows the high technological and operational level of the Israeli forces.
So this is a meticulously prepared plan…
To carry out this kind of operation, Israeli agents had to gather a lot of intelligence upstream. They had to decipher what device Hezbollah uses, so they had to gather a lot of human intelligence. Then, they had to reverse engineer it to find out how the beeper works. How it can be trapped. You have to be able to combine a digital, technological, electrical and physical approach. It is an extremely complex operation, which requires preparation time and a significant cost. A bit like what Stuxnet was in 2010, the first computer virus to have had an effect on the real world, and which targeted Iranian nuclear installations.
Digital technology itself is ultimately only one element of a much more complex set of military planning that has been imagined for many months. You have to know your enemy well enough to know that they are using their beeper and have had the idea to penetrate them. You also have to use them at the right time, so that it corresponds to the tempo of the military or political campaign. This did not happen in five days: the launch of this operation is part of a rise in tension in the relationship between Israel, Hezbollah and its ally Iran. With this operation, even if the attack is extraordinary and the number of wounded enormous, Israel remains below a certain threshold of intensity, which avoids entering into an all-out war.
How much preparation time does such an operation require?
This is a groundwork of several months. It requires a very detailed knowledge of Hezbollah’s methods of action. What are the references of the equipment they use? How do you get equipment of this type to dismantle and insert the part? Then, how do you penetrate Hezbollah’s supply and acquisition chain for this equipment? What is most impressive, for me, is once again not the technology, but the ability to act in the right place at the right time. These beepers are perhaps sold to thousands of people other than Hezbollah. How did they make sure that such a delivery was attributed to them? Everyone says it’s a cyber attack, but detonating an object remotely is a skill that has become basic. The Taliban can do this remotely with their “Improvised explosive devices”, or IEDs. Here, the non-digital side largely supplants the rest.
You emphasize the dual aspect of this attack: both digital (with its remote triggering) and its preparation in the real world. Can we say that Israel is engaging in hybrid warfare?
We can talk about hybrid combined work. In truth, the pure computer attack, if it can obviously exist, is above all a hacker’s dream. When you combine military operations, you use everything that is at your disposal. This is the advantage of integrating a cyber capacity into the panel of a planning and operations management center: cyber provides complementary tools to what combat swimmers are capable of doing, for example. The combination is a mode of action to ultimately conduct an operation. Very few nations today have the capacity to do this kind of thing, especially with such great precision in targeting.
Are you thinking of an operation of a comparable scale? Would France be able to carry out a similar operation?
No other example of an operation of this magnitude comes to mind. Look at the conflict in Ukraine: the Russians were not able to do this kind of very combined operation. Israel remains the most advanced nation and has the least qualms about this type of operation. A country with significant technological innovations, and the ability to conduct fine operations.
As for France, I cannot tell you that we have a process that is extremely integrated into military operations upstream. But our situation is not the same. The cyber weapon is like other weapons: used in the context of French military operations decided by the President of the Republic, against an enemy and in strict compliance with the law of armed conflict. When we were in Afghanistan against the Taliban, we were able to conduct operations that had effects on the ground. Today, there is no context that allows us to plan this type of operation, because France has no direct enemy.
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