Israel's pager attacks have changed the world

Our supply chains are vulnerable, which means that we are vulnerable.

- Bruce Schneier

Israel's brazen attacks on Hezbollah last week, in which hundreds of pagers and two-way radios exploded and killed at least 37 people, graphically illustrated a threat that cyber-security experts have been warning about for years: Our international supply chains for computerised equipment leave us vulnerable. And we have no good means to defend ourselves.

Though the deadly operations were stunning, none of the elements used to carry them out was particularly new. The tactics employed by Israel – which has neither confirmed nor denied any role – to hijack an international supply chain and embed plastic explosives in Hezbollah devices have been used for years. What's new is that Israel put them together in such a devastating and extravagantly public fashion, bringing into stark relief what the future of great power competition will look like – in peacetime, wartime and the ever-expanding grey zone in between.

The targets won't just be terrorists. Our computers are vulnerable, and increasingly, so are our cars, our refrigerators, our home thermostats and many other useful things in our orbits. Targets are everywhere.

The core component of the operation – implanting plastic explosives in pagers and radios – has been a terrorist risk since Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber, tried to ignite some on an airplane in 2001. That's what all of those airport scanners are designed to detect – both the ones you see at security checkpoints and the ones that later scan your luggage. Even a small amount can do an impressive degree of damage.

The second component, assassination by personal device, isn't new, either. Israel used this tactic against a Hamas bomb-maker in 1996 and a Fatah activist in 2000. Both were killed by remotely detonated booby-trapped cellphones.