Hamas World Cup app ‘spied on Israeli troops’
HAMAS built a functioning World Cup app and several dating apps to lure Israeli soldiers into giving up classified secrets, Israel’s military said yesterday.
The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) said operatives from the Islamist militant group created fake Facebook profiles, pretending to be attractive young Israelis. Hamas operatives then used the Facebook profiles to contact Israeli soldiers – writing in slang Hebrew and punctuating their messages with emojis – and tried to convince them to download the mobile apps, it claimed.
One app, called Gold Cup, was a World Cup app which Hamas updated with the latest football scores and statistics. “It actually was a very good one,” a senior IDF officer said.
A dating app called Glancelove advertised itself as “the best choice for new lovers who care about their privacy and safety”. Another was named Winkchat. Once downloaded, the apps allowed Hamas to access data on the phone and operate it remotely.
The Israeli military said fewer than 100 soldiers fell for the Hamas trap by downloading the apps. In a briefing with reporters, an officer said military security had not been compromised.
“Such activity had the potential to inflict damage to the IDF’S information security but no damage has been done,” the officer said. The IDF’S counterespionage operation was known as “Operation Brokenheart” after a Hamas operative used a brokenhearted emoji in a conversation with a soldier.
A Hamas spokesman could not be reached for comment.
Hamas has been experimenting with social media traps for Israeli soldiers since 2016 and the IDF has previously revealed attempts to contact soldiers via Facebook. In the group’s latest effort, they once again began their outreach on Facebook. Hamas operatives created profiles using stolen photographs, the IDF said. The fake profiles would comment on each other’s photographs and “like” each other’s posts to give the appearance of being real.
The IDF would not say exactly how many soldiers had been contacted, only that it was in the “hundreds”. Many became suspicious after being added by the strangers on Facebook and contacted their superiors. The IDF said it first learned of the infiltration attempt after troops raised the alarm and it had been monitoring the Hamas operation for several months.
Over the course of the Facebook chats, Hamas operatives would try to move the conversation to Whatsapp, the popular messaging service.
The operatives would then try to convince the soldiers to download the different dating apps or the World Cup app. The apps would allow Hamas to take over the soldiers’ phones, using them to take pictures and mining them for information. The apps appeared on Google Play, an app store that appears on Android devices. The apps involved have since been taken down.
A spokesman for Google said the company was looking into the reports.