The first shot fired in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was not a missile, but an information attack. Information warfare takes many forms, such as paralyzing government networks, spreading disinformation and blocking information channels.
Taiwanese authorities have recently discovered that “base stations” made in China and imported to Taiwan through illegal channels have been used by fraud syndicates to send text messages with the aim of tricking people into divulging information. This discovery prompts serious national security concerns.
Mobile phones have become the most important channel by which people obtain information. This raises questions about the backdoors that are built in to mobile phones and whether they could be taken advantage of by hostile countries. In peacetime, they could be used to collect information about people in Taiwan and monitor their activities, and in wartime they could be used as a cyberweapon.
Mobile phones have backdoors that commercial providers use to offer benefits such as software upgrades, troubleshooting, anti-theft features and debugging. This is not a big problem in democratic countries where the rule of law prevails.
For example, considering Apple Inc’s high share of the mobile phone market, a civil lawsuit by Apple phone users could cause the manufacturer to incur losses of hundreds of millions of US dollars. This makes it easier for democratic countries ruled by law to prevent malpractice.
However, in totalitarian countries it is institutionally inevitable that mobile phone manufacturerswill serve the government, and what is true in peacetime is even more so in wartime.
During wartime, any state can take over control of information service system providers, enabling them to deal with the spread of disinformation and bogus text messages. Therefore, although mobile phones have this backdoor issue, there are still ways to limit the damage. After all, mobile phones depend on base station signals to operate.
However, a serious question is whether illegally imported base stations that are used and controlled by fraudulent groups in peacetime could also be remotely controlled by hostile countries in wartime, and used to disseminate disinformation and bogus text messages in Taiwan. Judging by what has happened during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, this seems highly likely.
This kind of hardware Trojan horse is already in Taiwan and being used for nefarious purposes. This makes it an important national security issue rather than simply one of fraud prevention. The threat has reached a level that goes beyond the remit of the Ministry of the Interior.
Devices ranging from Chinese-brand cell phones to base stations smuggled in from China have already been deployed and could be used in wartime to launch attacks in the form of disinformation and malicious text messages.
Every country has regulations concerning the manufacture and sale of information equipment. Especially when a totalitarian country seeks to control another country’s public opinion, the latter cannot allow such base stations to be in use.
Furthermore, the recent case in Taiwan shows that the operation of base station equipment can be customized with an interface that can be easily operated by fraudsters. This means that criminal organizations could be being used systematically to accelerate and expand the deployment of illegal base stations in Taiwan.
That would mean that blatant information warfare by means of hardware deployment is already under way. Given this, the government must be more vigilant.
Kao Cheng-pu is a doctoral student in National Defense University’s Graduate Institute of Political Science.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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