SUPPLY-CHAIN SECURITYRemotely Exploding Pagers Highlight Supply Chain Risks

By Jason Van der Schyff

The attacks against Hezbollah using weaponized pagers and walkie talkies serve as a stark reminder of the dangers of compromised supply chains and why Australia must secure its own against the threats from China.

While the full details about the devices are yet to emerge, the operation—presumed to be carried out by Israel though not declared as such—indicates what could happen if supply chains were exploited in more subtle but equally insidious ways. For nations like Australia, the consequences could be just as catastrophic.

While infiltrating electronic supply chains is not a new tactic, these incidents highlight the dramatically growing sophistication of supply chain attacks. Prior to this operation, the most famous one was the Shin Bet’s 1996 assassination of Hamas’s chief bombmaker, Yahya Ayyash, using a rigged mobile phone.

With rising geopolitical tensions, particularly involving China, the risk of compromised hardware bound for Australia is alarmingly real, particularly considering China’s industrial capacity to produce at mass quantities.

China, as the world’s largest maker of electronic devices, plays a pivotal role in the global supply chain. But its dominance raises concerns, especially given its growing assertiveness and accusations of espionage and sabotage. There are genuine fears that China could exploit its control over the supply chain to insert vulnerabilities into hardware bound for Australia, whether for surveillance or sabotage.

A much-debated Bloomberg article of 2018, ‘The Big Hack’, brought hardware-based supply chain attacks into the public consciousness, citing Chinese involvement in planting microchips in American servers. Although the report’s validity remains contested, classified intelligence has long suggested that China’s role in compromised supply chains represents a significant and ongoing threat. While awareness of these threats has grown, action to mitigate them has not kept pace.

As early as 2011, the US Department of Defense warned that supply chain vulnerabilities were a ‘central aspect of the cyber threat’, stressing that over-reliance on foreign factories ‘provides broad opportunities for foreign actors to subvert US supply chains’. More than a decade later, this warning is more relevant than ever. Yet little progress has been made to secure critical infrastructure components that remain vulnerable to supply chain threats.

In Australia, the challenge is even more pressing. As a nation that relies heavily on imports for essential goods, from consumer electronics to military hardware, the potential for supply chain interdiction looms large, especially given that much of this equipment is manufactured in China.