6 September 2007: Orchard operation

(To Alessandro Rugolo)
09/09/18

In the 2007 in Italy we just heard of cyber. Someone dared to write their thesis trying to illustrate the meaning of terms like cyberspace, cyberdefence, cyberattack, but without having great success with the public. Yet the rest of the world moved on.
Israel in the meantime hit a nuclear installation in Syria with the use of the Air Force ...
The night of the 6 September at least 4 F-16I Sufa and 4 F-15I Ra'am they crossed the border with Syria towards the nuclear installation near the city of Deir ez-Zor.

The aircraft carried out their mission and all returned to the base without the Syrian anti-aircraft defenses noticing: the radars were blind and the anti-aircraft defenses did not come into operation, although they were very advanced Russian systems (Pantsir S1).
The success of the mission has always been attributed to the great skill of the Israeli pilots and the great work of Israeli electronic warfare, yet over time the truth has emerged: the mission was successful thanks to the use of a cyber weapon called Suter.
Suter it is a computer system that, through sensors, can identify the source of electromagnetic waves, for example a radar, understand what type of transmitter it has in front of it and send signals that can confuse the transmitter or even infect it with viruses.
Suteraccording to various sources, it is an American system developed by BAE Systems and integrated on some unmanned aircraft.
There are several versions of Suter, the most basic allows you to understand what the opponent's radars see, the second version allows you to take control of the opponent's network and control the sensors, the third version allows you to take control of the connected sensors and actuators, or of the weapon systems . All this is achieved "simply" by injecting some code built ad hoc.

These systems are used by the US at least from the 2006 and have been deployed in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.

What Israel has used Suter or something similar created by its laboratories does not matter, what is interesting to note is that very probably for at least ten years there are technologies capable of reducing the radar to impotence.

To learn more:
- https://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htecm/articles/20071006.aspx
- https://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/04/radar_hack_raid/
- https://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/04/radar_hack_raid/
- https://www.airforce-technology.com/features/feature1669/
- http://www.progettodreyfus.com/operazione-orchard-nucleare-siria-israele/
- https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/11/1157626_re-os-china-us-ct-mil-csm-...

(photo: IDF)