The suspected Israeli attack on Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah using explosive pagers and walkie-talkies is a spectacular flex, but one that would have been much harder to achieve 50 years ago.

The details of how Israeli intelligence supposedly achieved the operation are still not fully known. It’s not clear whether Mossad set up a dummy company to sell the pagers to Hezbollah, or intercepted consignments of pagers in transit to add the explosives using software capable of responding to a remote command. It may have done both, but it doesn’t really matter. What is more interesting is that the operation took advantage of deep, long and often loosely coupled global supply chains. No doubt more supply chain attacks will follow.

In their eternal quest to “unlock value”, financial markets have forced the large, vertically integrated industrial giants that dominated postwar economies to divest and outsource, creating instead relationships of discrete horizontally-integrated suppliers. (At least outside Korea, which retains its horizontally-integrated chaebol, such as LG and Samsung.)

As a consequence, there are now more entities in a supply chain in many more locations. Inevitably, this creates problems with oversight and accountability, as the Crowdstrike outage in July demonstrated. The bickering and finger-pointing between Microsoft and third-party company Crowdstrike highlighted how hard it is to make one company take responsibility.

US Congress has also conducted inquiries into the high-profile SolarWinds attack in 2020 that planted malicious software in the supply chain. A suspected Russian attack, it led to serious data breaches in the US Federal Government’s systems. Once a supplier is crippled — as blood lab Synnovis was this year — there is very little the upstream customer can do.

But many of our other technology supply chains have become more vulnerable too. The shift of manufacturing to China, or China-dominated economies such as Vietnam, and the obsessive desire to connect devices to a network both make the risks exponentially worse. The British deep state has been active in recognising the threat. Despite leaving the EU, the UK has obliged the rest of Europe to adopt much stricter UK-written security guidelines for domestic internet-connected devices such as doorbell cameras or routers.

There is no evidence that China has turned our e-bikes or mobile phone infrastructure into weapons. But much of modern data networks, such as those used in 4G or 5G mobile, are increasingly “software defined”, and fears of malicious software update patches were what convinced the UK to join the US in removing Huawei equipment from its infrastructure by 2027.

The automotive sector has been acutely conscious of the risks, and a security battleground for years. Dr Ken Tindell, co-founder of auto technology company Canis Automotive Labs which advises the Government, has been highlighting the vulnerability of a near-ubiquitous system called “CAN bus”. Controller Area Network (CAN) bus is a system that allows devices to communicate with each other, typically in vehicles.

Tindell admits that getting a car to explode remotely belongs to Hollywood, but he outlines more banal ways that this technology could cause significant economic damage. A hostile actor could cause gridlock by imposing a 15 mph maximum speed cap during rush hour via malicious software. It could cause a specific vehicle, such as one carrying a prime minister or president, to generate false instrument readings, leading to a crash.

It’s telling that Taiwanese company Gold Apollo, which designed the AR-924 model pagers that exploded, turns out not to be the manufacturer at all, but had licensed the brand to a Hungarian operation. “We may not be a large company but we are a responsible one,” founder Hsu Ching-kuang told Reuters.

Globalisation has created a Petri dish for mischief, and making it more resilient and secure will not be easy.