Did Hezbollah Crack Israeli Secure Radio?
According to Newsday:
Hezbollah guerrillas were able to hack into Israeli radio communications during last month’s battles in south Lebanon, an intelligence breakthrough that helped them thwart Israeli tank assaults, according to Hezbollah and Lebanese officials.
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. It also allowed Hezbollah anti-tank units to more effectively target advancing Israeli armor, according to the officials.
Read the article. Basically, the problem is operational error:
With frequency-hopping and encryption, most radio communications become very difficult to hack. But troops in the battlefield sometimes make mistakes in following secure radio procedures and can give an enemy a way to break into the frequency-hopping patterns. That might have happened during some battles between Israel and Hezbollah, according to the Lebanese official. Hezbollah teams likely also had sophisticated reconnaissance devices that could intercept radio signals even while they were frequency-hopping.
I agree with this comment from The Register:
Claims that Hezbollah fighters were able to use this intelligence to get some intelligence on troop movement and supply routes are plausible, at least to the layman, but ought to be treated with an appropriate degree of caution as they are substantially corroborated by anonymous sources.
But I have even more skepticism. If indeed Hezbollah was able to do this, the last thing they want is for it to appear in the press. But if Hezbollah can’t do this, then a few good disinformation stories are a good thing.
Tanuki • September 20, 2006 3:06 PM
IMHO it’s more likely that Hiz were able to D/F the signals, and maybe follow the frequency-hopping [which is pseudo-random for essentially-limited values of random]. But that doesn’t mean they were able to recover actual audio or data.
Civilian-grade cellphone conversations are an altogether simpler matter – and something that really shouldn’t be used even in tactical battlefield situations. Even things like the Sectera phones aren’t adequately secure for this.