Israeli soldiers duped by Hamas 'fake women' phone ruse

[amigocabal]

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-51530311

Israeli soldiers duped by Hamas 'fake women' phone ruse


Dozens of Israeli soldiers have had their smartphones hacked by the Hamas militant group posing as women seeking attention, Israel's military says.

A spokesman said the soldiers were sent fake photos of young females and lured into downloading an app without knowing it could access their handsets.

He said there was no "significant breach of information" before the scam was foiled.

Hamas, which controls Gaza, and Israel view each other as mortal enemies.

It is the third such attempt in recent years by Hamas to infiltrate Israeli soldiers' phones, but was the most sophisticated yet, according to Lt Col Jonathan Conricus.

Read more....

[Broomstick]

Yep, sex sells.... Healthy young men are interested in women* and this does seem like a decent approach to phishing.




* except, of course, for the healthy young men interested in other men.

[Solauren]

(Facepalm)

If these are military issued phones, why the hell doe the soldiers have the needed abilities to add or alter settings that would let this happen in the first place?

[Patroklos]

From the US perspective if they are not on a secure network, so 99% of government phones, there is no reason to deny your employees access to any number of apps that are useful for productive enterprise. There is also little reason to spend money to restrict them when it’s just a normal commercial network.

Most government agencies, including the military, heavily rely on social media for emergency announcements and routine business. My community in the military, for instance, has its own app to allow browsing of open billets, career management tools and info, and Unclassified professional reading.

Again, all unclassified. Secure networks are a different story.

[Ace Pace]

Those are not military issued phones. Israel issues phones to soldiers only from a given rank.

[Patroklos]

Yes, I am talking about military issues phones, a subset of government issues phones. And unless you are talking about a blanket policy phones are normally restricted by rank or duty responsibilities.

[Ace Pace]

My reply was to Solauren who thought these were military issued phones.

[Marko Dash]

have they also sent money to help out a Nigerian prince? i'm surprised this was from Hamas and not just random phishermen, scam email 101.

next they'll be getting calls about the warranty thats about to expire on their 20 year old car.

[The Grim Squeaker]

have they also sent money to help out a Nigerian prince? i'm surprised this was from Hamas and not just random phishermen, scam email 101.

next they'll be getting calls about the warranty thats about to expire on their 20 year old car.

These types of attacks are very different in scale and scope than nigerian prince scams .
The latter is focused on finding the abolsute dumbest individuals, who will ignore the spelling errors, warnings from the bank and typos. You have a huge target pool (all the emails you can acquire), and high cost of acquisition for any manual emails. This / the former, is about being plausible enough, as even a few successes is useful, and your initial pool is about 5 orders of magnitude smaller.