Israeli armed forces foil Hamas phone-flirting honeytrap

The Israeli military foils a Hamas ‘honeytrap’ in which soldiers’ phones were compromised by militants posing as young women.

Hamas targeted soldiers by using fake social media accounts. Picture: AP

The Israeli military claims to have foiled a Hamas “honeytrap” in which soldiers’ phones were compromised by militants posing as young women.

Soldiers were targeted with messages in the hope that they would download malware that ­allowed their phones to be hacked. Dozens were said to have done so. Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Conricus said it had been the most sophisticated attempt of several by Hamas to entrap soldiers by using fake accounts on WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and Telegram, among others.

Militants tried to strike up friendships, sending pictures, texts and voice messages and using ­Hebrew slang. The soldiers would then be “seduced” into downloading an app, said to be like the popular Snapchat platform, that would allow them to exchange pictures with the women.

In reality, the links were to three malware programs — Catch&See, ZatuApp and GrixyApp — that allowed Hamas to gain access to the phones. The scam was detected by the army and Shin Bet, Israel’s security agency, and Colonel Conricus ­denied that there had been a “significant breach of information”.

The plot was revealed after the Israel Defence Forces released a picture of a dark-haired young woman taking a selfie on its official Twitter account on Sunday morning.

Posted without context, the photo was initially assumed by many social media users to be a mistake, until a follow-up message on the @IDF account stated: “Hamas created fake social media profiles, using photos including this one, in an attempt to hack the phones of IDF soldiers. What Hamas didn’t know was that Israeli intelligence caught on to their plot, tracked the malware & downed Hamas’ hacking system. #CatfishCaught”

The IDF identified six main ­female characters used by Hamas, many of whom presented themselves as new immigrants to Israel to explain their less-than-fluent Hebrew and whose pictures were edited to disguise the source.

Colonel Conricus said it was “very clear” that Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, was ­behind the effort. He said the malware was linked to known Hamas servers and that at least one fake profile had been used in a previous scam. The soldiers whose phones were hacked would be called in to have the virus disabled.

The plot was revealed as another anti-Israeli militant group, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, was under scrutiny by the official body for the World Scout Movement after claims that it trained children to become Islamist terrorists. Imam Al-Mahdi Scouts, a licensed scout association that uses the fleur de lis badge and same uniform as the Scouts, is actually the youth wing of Hezbollah.

David Friend, spokesman for the World Scouting Movement, said: “All of our member organisations are expected to observe the non-political nature of the movement.”

The Times