Lebanon Pager Attacks: A New Front in Cyber Warfare

Lebanon pager attacks: the weaponisation of everything has begun

Lancaster University provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation UK. The attacks on pagers and walkie talkies (and possibly even solar panels) in Lebanon is one of those events that many have speculated was on the horizon: the weaponisation of everyday objects in 21st-century conflicts. But there were probably those who thought this "weaponisation of everything"- as security analyst Mark Galeotti puts it - was the stuff of Hollywood movies or cyberpunk crime thrillers. Transforming pagers or phones into explosive devices, in their view, was probably not possible both in technological or logistical terms. It was the type of scenario that only the most paranoid would think could actually become a reality. Yet it has now happened. And it has claimed the lives of 37 people, injured thousands more, and has created the possibility of catastrophic organisational disruption. The ability to communicate across your army or terrorist network has always been fundamental to warfare. And the ability to communicate - and to communicate quickly - is even more important as the geographical scale of war expands. An organisation needs to be able to trust that its tools of communication are reliable. And it needs to trust that the people they are talking to are real and not fake (or the products of AI - an increasing fear in times of "deep fakes"). Members of an organisation also need to find ways to ensure that they are not being listened to - a constant fear in times when the tools of communication are constantly evolving in their power and complexity. So, any organisation in the 21st century has to be paranoid about the threats of digital disruption and the different ways information and communication can be stolen, monitored and corrupted or manipulated. But turning the everyday tools of communication and information into actual weapons creates a new type of paranoia and fear. How concerned should we be? There are lots of people who will argue that what we seeing in Lebanon will inevitably be coming to a neighbourhood near you. Director of the Institute for Strategy & Technology at Carnegie Mellon University in the US, Audrey Kurth Cronin, has argued that one of the biggest security challenges on the horizon is the possibility of lethal enhancement by non-state actors in a time of "open technological innovation". In other words, we are living in times when the use of disruptive technologies is open to a growing number of organisations and individuals. It is no longer the great powers that have all the technological might. At the same time, in an era of increasing geopolitical tensions, there might be world leaders who feel that they can test the possibilities of the tactics that their hackers and technological experts have been planning and experimenting with. In 1999, two colonels in the Chinese military wrote a book on the changing character of war and international politics in an age of digital technologies. I discussed their ideas in my 2023 book Theorising Future Conflict: War Out to 2049. One of the most troubling comments in their book is on the potential weaponisation of everything in future global conflicts: "[These] new concept weapons will cause ordinary people and military men alike to be greatly astonished at the fact that commonplace things can also become weapons with which to engage in war." So, the events in Lebanon might give us a sense of what these military futurists from China saw on the horizon. Of course, it remains to be seen whether states will be able to keep up with a constantly changing security landscape. We are in a time of rapid change in a variety of emerging technologies. States that have more pressing concerns and lack the resources might have more to worry about. And groups such as Hezbollah may be entering a new period of vulnerability as this new age of conflict moves from futurist speculation to brutal reality. Geopolitical impact The events in Lebanon are not over and we don't know whether more attacks are to come. We also don't know what the broader geopolitical impact the attacks will have on the region. But, for the time being, it looks like there is a digital and geopolitical divide between those who will suffer these new tactics in this weaponisation of everything, and those that will be able to orchestrate increasingly creative types of attacks at a distance on individuals and organisations. For countries like the UK, it seems unlikely that global conflict would reach a point where hostile states such as Russia would exploit any vulnerabilities they have uncovered in the devices people use in everyday life. The various strategies of deterrence - nuclear arsenals, for example, which involve mutually assured destruction - do, at least for now, keep much of our conflict below the threshold of open war. And if geopolitical tensions do reach a point where Vladimir Putin's Russia explores these new military possibilities, then we would probably have far more to worry about than exploding iPhones. But it is non-state actors that may not be deterred from using this type of attack. So we need to hope they lack the serious organisational skill required to transform everyday items into explosive devices - and we need to hope that security services throughout the world are keeping their eye on emerging threats. In times of dramatic and rapid change in AI, drones, robots and cyberattacks, the only certainty is uncertainty in this complex, and often terrifying, world we are living in.

Gaza update: what the Lebanon pager attacks could mean for the Middle East conflict

This article was first published in our Gaza Update newsletter. Click here to receive our fortnightly updates on the conflict direct to your inbox. Israel tends not to rush to claim responsibility for assassinations and the like. But the reputation of its intelligence services goes before it. Most experts are saying that the fiendishly imaginative nature of the attacks in Lebanon this week, which involved thousands of exploding pagers and walkie talkies carried by members of Hezbollah, makes it odds-on that this was an Israeli operation. Another thing many academic experts and commentators agree on is that this could be the trigger than sets what for the past year - since Hamas carried out its brutal October 7 attacks in Israel and Israel launched its devastating retaliation on Gaza - has been a fairly consistent set of low-level exchanges of rocket fire and bombardment between the Israel Defense Forces and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. We spoke with Scott Lucas, who has been a regular contributor to our coverage of the conflict in Gaza and has offered valuable insights into its regional implications over the past year. Here he addresses four key questions which give context and significance to the attacks. Given the widespread assumption that Israel was behind the attacks, he believes that the country's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is feeling the pressure from his failure to deliver a decisive victory against Hamas in Gaza or return more of the Israeli hostages to their families alive and well. Hezbollah, meanwhile, is reeling from the damage the attacks have delivered to its command and control systems and the questoin is whether it is in any position to escalate, while its ally Iran is also not keen for an esclation into a regional conflict. Read more: What will the Lebanon pager attacks mean for Israel, Hezbollah and Iran? Expert Q&A Meanwhile, Tarek Abou Jaoude, who lectures in comparative politics with a particular focus on Lebanese affairs at Queen's University Belfast, believes that both sides appear to be talking themselves into a more intense confrontation, which could mean all-out war. Recent polling suggests that after 11 months of witnessing the conflict of Gaza, the people of Lebanon - despite being generally hostile towards Hezbollah which has implanted itself in their country as both a political and military state within a state - are increasingly supportive of Hezbollah's regional policies. Many Israelis, meanwhile, are tired of constant bombardment from Hezbollah rockets, which has displaced 60,000 of their fellow citizens in the country's north. It's a dangerous moment, he cautions. Read more: Lebanon pager attacks push Hezbollah and Israel to brink of all-out war Gaza Update is available as a fortnightly email newsletter. Click here to get our updates directly in your inbox. Looks like a war crime Anybody celebrating the ingenuity and audacity of the pager attacks is missing an important point. While these attacks may have been aimed at Hezbollah's communications systems with the aim of neutralising its command and control systems, it involved what appears to have been a fairly indiscriminate attack on people carrying Hezbollah-issued pagers and walkie talkies. It's important to remember that Hezbollah is not just a military organisation. It's also a political party with 15 of the 218 seats in the Lebanese parliament. So the attack didn't just involve military targets. Among its victims were children and other civilians, including Iran's ambassador to Lebanon. International humanitarian law, which will determine the legality of these attacks, expressly forbids the targeting of civilians in war, writes Giacomo Biggio, an expert in international law at the University of Bristol. In planning such an attack, he explains, "military commanders are under an obligation to do everything feasible to verify that the target of an attack is not a civilian". Not only that, but they much ensure that any collateral damage is "proportionate" - that is, that it should not be excessive to the "concreted and direct military advantage" anticipated from the attacks. His own view is that these attacks were likely in breach of the laws which are designed to protect civilians in time of war, and therefore could well be war crimes. Read more: Pager and walkie-talkie attacks on Hezbollah look like war crimes - international legal expert Weaponisation of everything The sight, on Tuesday afternoon, of people's pagers suddenly exploding as they shopped for groceries in Beirut must have been the stuff of some people's nightmares. A dystopian vision from the future of war, where a person's personal technology can be weaponised and turned against them. Mark Lacy, a senior lecturer in politics, philosophy and religion at Lancaster University, specialises in changing nature of warfare and traces the weaponisation of everyday technology from the pages sci-fi novels to the battlefield and beyond. It's important to remember, he writes, that what only state military might be able to achieve today, will inevitably be within the reach of terrorist groups and criminals in the near future. So, should we worry that our mobile phones might turn on us in the way people's pagers and walkies talkies attacked them in Lebanon this week? Perhaps not yet, Lacy concludes. But as he puts it: "In times of dramatic and rapid change in AI, drones, robots and cyberattacks, the only certainty is uncertainty in this complex, and often terrifying, world we are living in." Read more: Lebanon pager attacks: the weaponisation of everything has begun Gaza Update is available as a fortnightly email newsletter. Click here to get our updates directly in your inbox.