UK armed forces urged to revise smart devices in the wake of Hezbollah pager incident

The United Kingdom’s armed forces are being urged to rethink the use of smart devices in the wake of the Hezbollah pager incident that rocked the Middle East.

This revisal of security concerns comes in the wake of the electronic pager attacks that resulted in 2,800 people being injured and a dozen killed as explosions rippled through Lebanon and parts of Syria.

Major General (Retired) Chip Chapman, a former head of the Ministry of Defence’s (MOD) Counter Terrorist Unit, spoke to military media outlet Forces News about the threats that electronic devices could pose in the age of technological warfare.

He has urged caution in an era of cyberattacks and elaborate methods that hackers can deploy, like our coverage of the network and banking collapse in Ukraine. This would be the most significant cyber-attack of the Russia-Ukraine War so far, at the hands of politically motivated cyber criminals.

The retired military commander spoke of the threats posed by explosive or compromised devices. He told the army news outlet, “In operational security terms, they [Hezbollah] took the view that going to a more analog system would preserve their op sec (operational security). The flaw was they didn’t look inside them because a pager can’t explode, of course. A pager is just a pager until you add something to it.”

British Defence Secretary John Healey backed existing armed forces measures: “Military communications are evolving all the time, with ultra-secure systems like Trinity coming online, which uses a series of deployable nodes to create a self-contained battlefield network.”

Cyberattacks have been a prominent topic in 2024, with Russian cybercriminals at the forefront. Several European elections were at risk of large-scale distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

The United Kingdom has also been a focal point for cyber attacks such as the takedown of the King’s College Hospital, Guy’s and St Thomas’, including the Royal Brompton and the Evelina London Children’s Hospital.

Image: Pexels.

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