Hezbollah Hacked Israeli Military Radio 360
florescent_beige writes, "Newsday is reporting that Hezbollah was able to monitor secure Israeli military communications, perhaps using technology supplied by Iran, during the recent Lebanon war. A former Israeli general, speaking anonymously, called the results 'disastrous' for Israel. The story reports that an anonymous Lebanese source said that Hezbollah might have taken advantage of Israeli soldiers' mistakes in following secure radio procedures. The radio gear uses frequency hopping and encryption." The article identifies the Israeli communications equipment as the US-designed Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System.
Maybe they haven't really (Score:2, Interesting)
Ouch (Score:3, Interesting)
You stoooopid! (Score:0, Interesting)
perhaps using technology supplied by Iran
Ok, all together now: DUUUUUUUUUHHH!
That whole scuffle was Israel versus Iran-By-Proxy.
Personally, I love how the arabs can stand on the pile of rubble that used to be their infrastructure and shout "we won!"
Dumbest. Culture. Ever. And that's saying something on this silly planet.
Re:Frequency hopping? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The Real News (Score:5, Interesting)
This is different from the way U.S. intelligence services handle secrets. They maintained the fiction surrounding the Venona decrypts for 50 years. However, the Soviets found out about the project somewhere around 1948 from a spy. And, the U.S. then found out from one of their spies that the Soviets had found out about Venona. So both sides' intelligence agencies knew about the break, yet it was kept secret from the public. Even though the intel was germane to the FBI prosecutions of several traitors, including the Rosenbergs (who were very obviously guilty after having read the Venona decrypts.) The info could also have been used to verify Senator McCarthy's allegations (or prove him wrong.) Lots of good could have come from knowing the truth.
Of course! (Score:0, Interesting)
eldavojohn
Re:Ouch (Score:5, Interesting)
It is far more likely that some ass hat of a soldier left a radio, a list of channels and codes, and/or other secret information relating to communication someplace available to the enemy.
When faced with two explanations, one taking an amazing amount of skill and luck, and the other taking a severe amount of incompetence... go with incompetence.
-Rick
Re:Frequency hopping? (Score:5, Interesting)
FH is an Electronic Counter Countermeasures (ECCM) measure. It is intended to make the radios harder to jam (jammer needs to transmit on a wide band of frequencies in stead of a single frequency) and harder to locate through direction finding.
Communications security (COMSEC) is provided by a symmetric encryption module on the radios. FH/ECCM is emphatically NOT a substitute for encryption.
The article did not come right out and say that the encryption was broken. It is not unknown, especially in a time-critical situation such as a firefight, for users to switch the encryption off if they are having difficulty talking to another unit. The thought is that some communications, even non-secure, is better than nothing in the heat of the moment.
The more likely way an enemy gets into the radio net is to capture a keyed radio, even worse if they get a crypto fill device too. Reacting to such a compromise is a critical skill set for the signal personnel in a combat unit.
-"Pro Patria Vigilans"
Re:The Real News (Score:3, Interesting)
You many need a multi band antenna but I doubt that most frequency hopping systems hop out of band.
Re:The Real News (Score:2, Interesting)
For the poster who asserts that Iran articles are a dime-a-dozen these days - while some are apparently fake, this one rings with a great deal of plausibility. It's not something that we've just pushed out recently to state Iran is supporting Hezbollah - the intelligence services have been saying for 20+ years that Iran has been a supporter of their organization, its contemporaries, and their predecessors. What's news is that they're doing so now so flagrantly without concern for international repercussion. And the notion that Iran may have technology to intercept and break these transmissions isn't so far-fetched, either. The FH / crypto used on these systems is actually quite old and based on computing power which didn't even anticipate what a laptop computer today is capable of. But we'll probably not know details of this aspect for 50+ years. What we can talk about is that the idea that they did have access to all the Israelis' communications fits with what we do know. The Israeli Army has shown itself time and again to be one not to be trifled with, and yet they were given a very bloody nose in this recent engagement... not by a collaboration of Arab nations, but by a terrorist organization with largely inferior arms and far less training. Yes, part of their losses stemmed from their shift of tactics to a campaign of minimizing collateral damage. Additional losses stemmed from the hesitance of the Israeli government to commit. But that doesn't explain losses which should not have otherwise occurred (the majority) in the individual battles. Short of having been trained alongside the Iranian version of special forces, Hezbollah could not have inflicted such heavy casualties on the Israelis without having exceptional intelligence. We already know that the Iranians provided them with UAVs... why not SIGINT gear as well?
well the article is deceptive, too (Score:5, Interesting)
What the article actually says about 'hacking' Israeli military radio communications is merely this:
Using technology most likely supplied by Iran, special Hezbollah teams monitored the constantly changing radio frequencies of Israeli troops on the ground. That gave guerrillas a picture of Israeli movements, casualty reports and supply routes.
So what precisely did Hezbollah do? Sounds like they merely verified that there was radio traffic on certain frequencies, and that it came from Israeli units, and then they were able to do a little direction-finding on it to verify where it came from. Look, imam! Funky radio traffic in the Bekaa valley that sounds like the usual gibberish exchanged between Israeli armor and base -- I'll bet there are Israeli tanks on Route such-and-such!
Well, gosh, big deal. Any amateur could do as much as easily. It's not right brilliantly clever to deduce when you get a lot of chatter on military frequencies in a certain neighborhood that there are military operations afoot in it. I mean, Hezbollah probably got as good or better "intelligence" about Israeli movements just by taking reports of survivors who counted the number of tanks that rolled over them.
Did Hezbollah actually decrypt communications, which would be an intelligence coup? Your logic argues pretty persuasively that they did not, because if they had they would have kept it a deep dark secret. In fact, they would have done their best to avoid drawing attention to their radio-interception program, lest it start the Israelis thinking. They -- or rather their Iranian paymasters -- would not have countenanced boasting about the operation to a damn fool journalist who would embellish it with wild speculation about 'hacking' secret Israeli radio messages.
Nor does the article actually manage to get anyone who might have known to say otherwise. It merely attempts to imply that they might have said it, or something like it. Hence statements like this:
The official refused to detail how Hezbollah was able to intercept and decipher Israeli transmissions.
A nice example of the old 'begging the question' fallacy, such as in the question 'Have you stopped beating your wife yet?' Maybe the official refused to "detail" how Hezbollah was able to decipher Israeli transmissions because, in fact, they weren't able to.
Or this:
But a former Israeli general, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Hezbollah's ability to secretly hack into military transmissions had "disastrous" consequences for the Israeli offensive.
"Israel's military leaders clearly underestimated the enemy and this is just one example," he said.
Hmmm....wait a minute, the direct quote only says the military leader underestimated Hezbollah. And what's the mysterious 'this' to which the general refers, which is an example of the underestimation? Interception and radio direction-finding? Or actual decryption? We don't know. The journalist implies, in the previous sentence, that 'this' means 'hacking' into military transmissions, and that this means interception and decryption. But does it?
If the anonymous general were willing to be quoted saying quite plainly: "Ayup, Hezbollah decrypted our most secret communications, damn 'em," then you can bet your last dollar the journalist would have used that very juicy quote. The fact that he didn't use that quote, or one like it, means he couldn't get it. And I'm sure he tried very hard, with all the artful questions he could. The general just wasn't willing to say those words. Because, almost surely, they would have been false.
In short, I think the odds are good that this is just another journalist whoring for Hezbollah, 'cause it makes a scary exciting man-bites-dog story.
Re:The Real News (Score:4, Interesting)
Even the NSA doesn't go quite that far; in this article [nsa.gov] they only claim the intercepts show that Ethel " may have known about her husband's activities" (my emphasis).
Innocent until proven guilty, right?
Re:I think it may be several things (Score:1, Interesting)
I love when news bounces right off someone's ultra-thick skull. Hacking the enemy comms is just one piece of evidence among many that Hezbollah is much more militarly sophisticated that anyone assumed. Just because they are unable to invade Isreal doesn't change the fact that they were vastly underestimated by the people trying to kill them.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The Real News (Score:4, Interesting)
The most likely explanation then would be that Israel had already figured out their communications had been compromised, and that Hezbollah in turn figured out what Israel figured out. At that point the best thing to do is to make the shared knowledge public for PR and morale purposes.
Hezbollah may not be a regular army, but they showed enough savy and sophistication during the conflict that I doubt they would give up the advantage of being able to hear Israel's communication.
For instance during World War II, even after the allies had broken a German code or devised a method to figure out that day's cipher string, they would still go about their routine of acting like they didn't know what the Germans were going to do.
Yes, I remember this in the Pacific too, with a carrier battle (Midway I think) where we knew from intercepted communications exactly where the Japanese fleet was, but we first flew a recon plane near enough to the fleet to be seen so it would appear as if we just "accidentally" ran into them in the middle of the ocean. We sacrificed some element of surprise to maintain the illusion that their codes were secure.
Also there were U.S. codes that were compromised by the Japanese, but in this case we knew it. We used these codes to send messages we wanted the Japanese intercept and read, and would gauge their reactions in messages we intercepted from them to improve our intelligence.
Re:The Real News (Score:3, Interesting)
In short: Did Israel achieve any of it objectives in the war? Has it gained ground or lost ground, politically, economically, militarily?
Hmmm. (Score:4, Interesting)
There is also the perspective that obscurity is not the same as security. If you have secret A and are trying to prevent B from knowing it, you can NEVER be certain that B does not have that information. If they obtain knowledge of A, and keep that hidden from you, then your obscurity becomes a weapon against you. This is the problem the Germans had once the Enigma ciphers were broken. By relying totally on obscurity, the Germans became extremely vulnerable. Obscurity is a VERY dangerous tool.
By far the best tactic is to assume the enemy could know everything - not necessarily that they will, but that they could. This introduces a degree of fault-tolerence into actions. It does not rely on an assumed weakness that may not exist (and therefore make those carrying out the action the weaker party), but assumes that the opposition is as competent and capable as it chooses to be. As this is often much closer to reality, it is a better assumption to make.
In terms of encryption, for example, using an obscure algorithm puts you at gigantic risk as it can't have had the eyeballs to verify that it is indeed secure. Furthermore, people are more likely to use weak keys, as they won't see the point in taking care, as they're working on the basis that they don't need to. A very stupid practice. The best you could do is make the algorithm public, utterly destroy any delusions of absolute mental superiority, and force people to work damn hard to use the algorithm correctly. If the enemy finds a fault and keeps it secret, they would have done so anyway, so you lose nothing. If Joe Smurf on sci.crypto finds a fault and publishes it, you will have time to fix the bug or switch to another method. Overall, you lose nothing.
Assuming the enemy is an idiot, merely because they're the enemy, is the best way to lose a battle or a war. Either that or acting stupid.
Re:I think it may be several things (Score:5, Interesting)
> second largest employer, mostly for its network of government services that it
> provided to areas that the Lebanese government was either unable to or unwilling
> to provide to -- schools, hospitals, etc. Public service activism is one of the
> main ways that the party wins support, even down to the local level. I saw a
Yes, but it's Iranian money; Hezbollah is basically an Iranian shell company. One could argue that they've bought loyalty with this money. But there's evidence that some of this loyalty has been frayed by anger at the pointless destruction that Nasrallah's group instigated.
There's also anecdotal reports about people who were ordered to stay put in southern Lebanese towns by Hezbollah gunmen, apparently to provide more human shields.
> Contrary to popular myth, Hezbollah (unlike Hamas and the other Palestinian
> groups) prefers not to operate around civilians. Not for a concern for the
> civilians' safety -- they'll confiscate buildings to use as shooting positions
> if needed, whether their owners like it or not -- but for their own
> safety. Hamas operates openly as a sign of pride and defiance. However, by
> doing that, it only takes a tiny handful of defectors to point out to Israel
> where they are and what they're doing. Hezbollah, on the other hand, prefers to
> operate in areas where nobody is around to reduce the risk of being exposed by
> defectors.
This may be true but many Hez fighters nonetheless operated extensively around civilians, sometimes in the same building but more often near civilian-occupied structures.
> As we saw in the last conflict, they're a very effective military, and it's a
> big question mark on how to deal with them. It's almost funny how the major
> Arab powers were defeated one after another, yet this tiny band was blowing up
> warships and taking out hundreds of Merkavas, in addition to maintaining a
> steady rain of over 100 Katyushas per day throughout the entire conflict. And
> now their popularity is soaring -- not just in other countries, but even in
> Lebanon, where they started the conflict. Check out these polls. Check out this
> as well.
As stated previously, there is also a lot of anger at Hezbollah for starting the conflict which wrecked people's homes across the south as well as parts of Beirut and set the country back many years in its economic development. Hezbollah has resorted to paying off returning families with $10K grants and crowing about its victory, while opposition editorialists have denounced Hezbollah for their reckless adventure.
Hezbollah certainly did not take out "hundreds of Merkavas"; I believe the number is more like 13, and the IDF is claiming that the Merkavas actually performed very well--probably would have done even better without this communications hacking disaster, and no doubt they have a lot more incentive now to get off their duffs and install the Trophy system (reported on
Given 4-5 more weeks, Israel would undoubtedly have degraded Hezbollah significantly enough that it would not be a threat again for a long time. Note how after claiming he would never cease fire, Nasrallah hypocritically sued for a cease-fire, and Israel's stupid government caved to U.S. pressure to call it off just when they were finally winning.
Privately, the Iranians are said to consider this war a disaster bo
Re:well the article is deceptive, too (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, Hezbollah had the cell phone numbers of the Israeli commanders. That was a huge breach of security by Israeli forces. There had to be some translations going on, and I'll bet it was the cell phone traffic. Hezbollah had Hebrew-speaking translators and they must have translated something.
Israel is going to learn radio discipline = cell phone discipline.
Re:I think it may be several things (Score:3, Interesting)
> they want you to see, with the slant that they want it to have.
Hm, I don't watch TV but I do read a lot. The Israeli army, especially the reservists, has had its budgets cut a lot in recent years, and its equipment is old. There's a famous report of some reservists obtaining new backpacks from a wealthy American relative because the IDF expected them to go with whatever they had. The tanks were also running outdated equipment. The Israelis asked for an accelerated shipment of bunker busting bombs from the U.S. and undoubtedly other less public items, but it's a bit of a stretch to say they were completely up to date with their equipment. Here is where Ariel Sharon really fell down on the job, thinking that war with Lebanon was never going to happen.
Hezbollah would like us all to believe they beat the mighty Israeli army through sheer valour and righteousness, but in fact it was more like a combination of Hezbollah competence and preparedness and Israeli unpreparedness for their tactics. The rematch will be different, I think, because a competent Israeli leadership would not make the same mistakes again, and I strongly suspect that the current leadership is going to be booted out. Hezbollah, meanwhile, has shown every card in their hand and will have to go back to the drawing board and reinvent themselves in order to take the Israelis by surprise a second time.
As for Katyusha launchers, there are satellite and drone photographs of the things sitting in courtyards of buildings; Hezbollah certainly didn't avoid dwellings, and the Israelis certainly didn't go after buildings just to be vindictive; every civilian they hit becomes another martyr and propaganda point for the enemy.
The heavy rocket attacks by Hezbollah were undeniably a very visible, if largely ineffective, aspect of their arsenal. I'm sure it made for great TV footage. The Israeli air force destroyed most of them, but it only takes one launcher to send 100 rockets a day, and they apparently had thousands of rockets hidden in caves and caches, so it was going to be a long, slow slog to get rid of all of them. I think the Katyushas were more impressive as a propaganda thing than as a strategic weapon; they hardly hit any military targets, and mainly were able to hit Haifa, a religiously mixed city known for its relatively harmonious Jewish-Arab relations (ironically).
Despite its losses, Israel was steadily degrading Hezbollah, and a few more weeks would have forced Hezbollah to stop firing Katyushas in order to avoid losing its last remaining rocket launchers, and losing men at a rate of 100/week would have reduced Hez as a fighting force. Israel could have and probably should have stayed a few weeks longer, because now Syria and Iran are sending tons of new equipment to Lebanon and rearming Hez as quickly as they can. Israel is certainly watching all of this; they keep sending their drones over Lebanon and it's likely they know where Nasrallah is and what he had for breakfast, and wondering whether to take him out or not. This fight's not over yet.