Terrorist group Hamas, which was responsible for the recent atrocities committed in Israel, is reported to be using the smartphones of dead and captured Israeli hostages as entry points to monitor Israeli citizens in preparation for forthcoming cyber-strikes on Israel.
“I’ve been invited to over 20 groups for providing humanitarian aid or aid in decrypting enemy messages. Most of these groups are monitored by Hamas. They are using the phones of the captives to enter these groups and to monitor them,” Michael Yehoshua, a Tel Aviv resident who works at cybersecurity vendor HolistiCyber, told London-based technology publication Tech Monitor.
“[Hamas] penetrated the groups because they have the phones of the kidnapped or dead…They also connect to the new groups that have been established for aid, and they gather intelligence through this,” added Yehoshua.
Hamas could execute devastating cyber-strikes
Monitoring Israeli citizens in this way could enable Hamas to execute cyber-attacks on Israeli soil from across the border or from many Muslim locations with potentially devastating consequences. By using off-the-shelf artificial intelligence, the terrorists could carry out a process called ‘social engineering’ to instantly build up a sufficiently detailed profile of a relative, friend, or colleague of the hostage or the deceased to engineer highly targeted ‘phishing’ emails, appearing to come from a trusted source. All the unsuspecting relative, colleague, or friend needs to do is open a single link or attachment to execute hidden malware prepared by Hamas.
In the case of private citizens, the damage would most likely be financial and not particularly damaging. However, in the case of a soldier or someone employed in the energy or water treatment sectors, the outcome could be devastating. For example, a cyber-strike on a water treatment facility in Israel could result in the kind of breach that recently almost poisoned much of Israel’s water supply, which was executed by Iran, a close ally of Hamas, and was fortunately thwarted in time.
It must be hoped that Israel’s cyber skills are sufficient to thwart the terrorists – as they have generally been so in the past. Knowledge of the stolen smartphones and their contents should enable Israel’s cyber defense forces to gather sufficient intelligence to anticipate incoming attacks from these sources.
