“This is how Hamas takes over your cellphone,” trumpets a video from the Israeli army video in large Hebrew letters, to a background of scary music.
The video then cuts to an interview with an Israeli soldier with his face blacked out, who describes a Facebook message he recently received from someone he believed was a young Israeli woman.
Fake women's profiles operated by Hamas in an effort to lure IDF soldiers (Photo:IDF Spokeersn'sUnt)
“She sent me a message on Facebook. We spoke a lot over a few days. She said she was a prison guard, and I told her I was in the army,” he said. “Then she asked me to download this chat app so that we could talk more. I downloaded it, but it did not work. I tried to reach her again on Facebook, but she didn’t answer.”
The soldier then described how the app was actually a spy tactic from the Islamist Hamas movement in the Gaza Strip, which collects information about soldiers and their locations even when their phones are switched off.
The video, along with a new radio campaign telling soldiers to report any Facebook friend requests from someone they don’t know comes after the army said that Hamas infiltrated “dozens” of Facebook accounts of Israeli combat soldiers.
“The idea is to educate and make soldiers aware as a first line of defense to explain the threat of what Hamas is trying to do and how they’re using the soldiers,” IDF Captain Libby Weiss told The Media Line. “The idea is not to tell soldiers 'Don’t use social media,' but to teach them to be more savvy and aware of how terror organizations use social media to our detriment.”
Weiss said that the army does not believe the hacking caused significant damage as it was caught before it became widespread. She said one female soldier saw her profile picture being used in a fake account in Facebook, and alerted the army.
The fact that phones now have GPS makes them even more dangerous. Israeli media reported soldiers using their phones to order pizza, giving
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