The Hamas terror group again attempted to spy on the Israeli military by taking control of hundreds of soldiers’ cellphones over the past few months, using spyware they’d convinced the service-members to download by posing as young Israeli women on social media, the Israel Defense Forces said Sunday.
The military said it thwarted this cyber attack in a joint effort with the Shin Bet security service, dubbed Operation Rebound, over the weekend, taking down the servers Hamas used in its effort.
The IDF said it did not believe Hamas had obtained any significant intelligence in its operation, but would soon know more precisely as it would be checking the phones of all the troops involved. The IDF refused to say precisely how many soldiers were affected, but said it was in the “low hundreds” and that only the phones of conscripted soldiers and low-ranking officers were infected with Hamas’s spyware.
The head of the IDF’s operational security department — who can only be identified by her rank and first Hebrew letter of her name, Col. “Resh” — said the military expected this would not be the last time that Hamas tries this type of cyber operation, as there are several members of the terror organization specifically tasked with such efforts, though she refused to identify them by name.
Similar efforts were uncovered and blocked by the military in January 2017 and July 2018. Hamas’s cyber operations department in Gaza City was bombed by the IDF in May 2019 during a two-day battle with the terror group in the Strip.
Resh said in this case Hamas used more sophisticated methods and technologies in its catfishing effort.
