New in SpyWeek: Beyond Deadly Pagers

UPDATEDHezbollah confirmed early Saturday that its longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah had been killed in an Israeli airstrike on his underground headquarters in Beirut. Also notable: the strike as well killed a senior Iranian commander of the Quds Force, Brig. General Abbas Nilforoushan, who led operations for Lebanon and Syria.

Israel’s diabolically imaginative plan to put exploding pagers and walkie-talkies into the hands of Iran-backed Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon two weeks ago generated unsurprising ‘wow’ headlines – quickly followed by concerns that our adversaries might be inspired to mount copycat operations on using American electronics supply chains. While privately expressing some concern this week about the infiltration of supply seats (more on this in the coming days), SpyTalk’s expert intelligence sources said their much bigger concern is the growing tsunami of real and potential sabotage and election-targeted info-warfare operations via “the Internet of Things”. ‘by foreign adversaries Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. Case in point: a DOJ-led grand jury indictment Friday from three Iranian hackers.

In the case at hand, the Iranians were accused of targeting a wide range of US officials with email phishing and other schemes over the past four years, but had recently managed to steal sensitive Trump campaign documents and provided them to the Biden administration in clippings -Harris camp to offer. and journalists, reminiscent of the Russian theft of internal DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign emails from 2016 distributed by Wikileaks to an overly enthusiastic press.

This time the recipients of the stolen goods, except one, former Intercept reporter and current Substacker Ken Klipstein-didn’t bite. He published a dossier on JD Vance, for which MAGA cheerleader Elon Musk’s