IDF foils Hamas honey trap operation aimed at hundreds of solders’ phones

Hamas was behind a “honey-trap” operation to hack into the phones of Israeli soldiers to extract information including locations, said the Israel Defence Forces.

The elaborate cyber-attacks used fake profiles of young attractive women on popular social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and Telegram, in order to target active duty conscripts.

Once a conversation began, the ‘women’ – writing and sometimes speaking in broken Hebrew – enticed the target into downloading a malicious app that inserted spyware onto the soldiers’ phone.

This allowed Hamas to extract data, including locations, and even listen in to conversations. The IDF said no classified information was leaked, despite hundreds of soldiers being targeted and “dozens” actually downloading the spyware.

This is at least the third such operation by Hamas’s cyber unit since 2017.