Information warfare the heartbreaker

The heartbreaker was an information warfare attack made against the Israeli military where Hamas hackers would set up profiles on social media and entice Israeli military personnel with sex. It started out with enticing them with sex, then the hackers would try to get the soldiers to download applications on their smart phones that were really spyware, and then they would use that spyware to extract sensitive data from the soldiers phones. When Google was informed of this spyware, they removed the applications from the store. This is interesting because now I know that some applications on the Google store could potentially be spyware for military operations. There are also so many hackers in Pakistan that they have made a law for preventing hacking. If a person is killed because of this hacking, the hacker is punished by execution.

I have learned that you cannot trust any old application on the market these days. A solution to not falling victim to spyware that is on the market is to wait a while until you download the app. If you wait a while before downloading the app there is a chance that Google or the app store will remove the app before you even decide to download it. Another thing that I learned is that there are some very skilled hackers in Pakistan. According to the article that I read Pakistan has one of the largest hacker communities in the world. If you are trying to make some hacking software, you might want to hire a pakistanian.

The evolution of this kind of information warfare can result in almost anything known to humankind. They were using social engineering and the solicitation of sex to lure Israeli soldiers into a trap. The future of that can be something like actually spoofing soldiers friends whole social network profiles and luring them in while the soldier thinks that it is their friend. To prevent this kind of attack the first thing to take into account is that you should never respond to the solicitation of sex. When someone is soliciting sex to you that is a red flag right there, unless you are in Las Vegas. Computer professionals have already addressed this kind of issue by figuring out about it and reporting it to Google and the app store in which the spyware apps have been removed.

source: http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htiw/articles/20180721.aspx