Israel’s pager attack shows depth of supply chain infiltration

Israel has not commented or claimed responsibility for the attack. U.S. and other officials briefed on the operation, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told The New York Times that Israel was behind the attack and had infiltrated a batch of Taiwanese-brand pagers to plant explosives. inside the device.

Spokesmen for the Israel Defense Forces and the US Department of Defense did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

An attack of this size requires a massive amount of technical capabilities involving intelligence gathering and months of planning, a national security expert and a weapons expert told BI.

“The scale of this operation suggests a complex supply chain attack by a state actor,” NR Jenzen-Jones, director of Armament Research Services, told BI. “This would have required a significant investment in terms of manpower and other resources and probably months of planning.”

And if Israel was indeed behind the attack, as US officials said, then it’s no surprise from a country that has already proven its technical prowess, Sean McFate, a national security and foreign policy expert at the Maxwell School of Citizenship & of Syracuse University. Public Affairs, BI said.

“Israel is a very tech-savvy state with its own ‘Wadi Valley,’ as they say,” McFate said.

Supply chain experts also told BI that the attack shows how vulnerabilities in global supply chains are often overlooked and can be exploited in warfare.

“The fact that explosives were planted in the pagers before reaching Hezbollah shows the challenges of securing the supply of electronics, especially for international shipments,” Robert Khachatryan, CEO of Freight Right Global Logistics, told BI.

Online images appear to show that the pagers in the attack were branded Gold Apollo, a company based in Taiwan, NBC News reported. The company told the press in a statement that a Hungarian-based entity called BAC Consulting has been authorized to use the Gold Apollo brand and that “the design and manufacturing of the products is entirely managed by BAC.”

Cristiana Bársony-Arcidiacono, BAC’s executive director, denied doing the paging in a statement to NBC News and said she was “just the go-between.”

Gold Apollo did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Business Insider was unable to reach BAC Consulting for comment. The company’s website appeared to be down as of Wednesday evening.

Jenzen-Jones said that while supply chain attacks are often thought of in the context of cyber attacks, “sabotaging enemy supply lines has a long history in warfare.”

In 2012, The New York Times published a story about a covert US-led cluster munitions program intended for use by the Taliban.

The scale of Tuesday’s attack in Lebanon, and the targeting of an object like a pager rather than weapons, is what makes this operation different, Jenzen-Jones said.

“For such an attack – one that uses everyday objects modified to produce potentially lethal effects in a targeted way – the scale of the operation is unprecedented,” he said.