[john-radio]

> The embarrassing security lapse is linked to a book he published on Amazon, which left a digital trail to a private Google account created in his name, along with his unique ID and links to the account’s maps and calendar profiles.

I'm interested to know more about the nature of the lapse here. Is there a bug in Amazon where self-publishers expose their account email addresses? Or was it more like, he shared Google Map and Google Calendar content in the book, not realizing that those features exposed his real email?

[TrueDuality]

From that line and a few others in the article Amazon doesn't seem to be involved at all. It seems like there was a Gmail account created to receive feedback, corrections, reviews, and media outreach that was also supposed to be relatively anonymous but was registered with his actual name which would be visible to anyone that he responded to at the very least, but may also show up through other account associations.

[dmix]

The article also said he created that email specifically for the book to deal with queries. So it's possible there's more to it.

> Contacted by the Guardian, an IDF spokesperson said the email address was not Sariel’s personal one, but “dedicated specifically for issues to do with the book itself”.

[SV_BubbleTime]

I figured it wasn’t “small nation state bug discovered in supply chain” but rather “yea, he used his real name”.

[TrueDuality]

It's always a small detail that gets you... You only have to fail once for your OPSEC to crumble into nothing.

[Shrezzing]

The book is published under a pseudonym made up or his rank and initials and the blurb on Amazon reads:

>[pseudonym], an expert analyst, technology director, commander of an elite intelligence unit, and winner of the prestigious Israel Defense Prize for his artificial intelligence based anti-terrorism project

The defense prize projects & unit conducting the projects are published in The Times of Israel. The person's rank & name is publicly known from other historic news articles. With that context, the google account and Amazon weren't really important to linking the General to the unit in question.

[stef25]

Where did you find that this person even exists ? If the email is [e-mail] then you still need some kind IDF directory that lists his name, along with his current position. A name alone doesn't mean shit. I think ?

[alephnerd]

Israel is a very small country. It has the population and size of the Bay Area.

Everyone is basically a 2nd or 3rd level connection.

It has it's pros (eg. VC and Entrepreneurship is much easier because the barrier to entry is lower) but also it's cons (gossip flows very quickly, and it's fairly easy to unmask someone).

This is also why the IDF is so ferocious in Gaza - everyone in Israel and the Diaspora either knows someone or is related to someone who died either on 10/7 or during the deployment (eg. I'm from the west coast yet an elementary school classmate of mine died in the Nova massacre, and a couple former coworkers were mobilized to Gaza because they had an infantry MOS back in the day) so there is no appetite for reconciliation.

Also, most of 8200 basically leaves and joins the private sector after a couple years, and the younger guys (post-2010) seem to have sloppy opsec compared to the older ones, for example publicly listing that they are ex-8200 on LinkedIn or social media.

The IDF, Shabak, Aman, and Mossad have all deteriorated severely since the 2000s, because the best and the brightest in Israel now have private sector options that pay way more and give you way more fame, instead of working as a relatively underpaid bureaucrat in a country just as expensive as the Bay Area.

A similar trend is happening in Singapore as well, as almost all my A*STAR friends and classmates broke bond and naturalized in the US instead of returning. Only those whose families owned a house or a car returned (iykyk).

[philistine]

> The IDF, Shabak, Aman, and Mossad have all deteriorated severely since the 2000s

Absolutely true. Never forget that the vicious attacks by Hamas were never leaked to the Israelis. The supposed spookiest spooks in the whole wide world didn't know about an attack being planned within their own borders.

[alephnerd]

Actually, it's even worse than that.

The lower levels of the Intelligence Services had a vague idea an attack like this would happen [0] but dismissed it as unrealistic, and Egypt even warned Israel 3 days before the attack [1] but most likely it was ignored/procrastinated due to the Judical Protests and Yom Kippur holiday season.

There was a systemic failure that is very unsurprising due to the relative lack of long term institutional knowledge as Intelligence Community and Policy members left to work for American MNCs like Microsoft or Google, or start their own massive cybersecurity companies like Palo Alto Networks, SentinelOne, Wiz, etc.

Before the economic reforms in the 1990s-2000s, the only options for the best and brightest in Israel was to become a careerist in the Israeli Government or emigrate to the US to found companies like PANW. This meant a large subset of Israel's top talent remained in the government, but all that fell apart due to economic liberalization because people had better choices that paid more and had better work hours.

It's the exact same story in Singapore and South Korea today, and a similar brain drain happened in the former Soviet Union and India in the 1990s.

> The supposed spookiest spooks in the whole wide world didn't know about an attack being planned within their own borders

Imo, the reason Israel's intelligence community was a top player in the 1970s-90s was because most Israelis were 1st-1.5 generation refugees from Arab countries. Mizrahi Jews (especially Yemeni) are fairly overrepresented in careerist Military and Police roles in Israel due to a relative lack of career options, and a number of that generation was L1 Arabic or Farsi speaking.

By the 2000s-2010s, the younger generation was 2nd or 3rd generation and truly "Israeli" so a lot of the cultural nuances in the Arab World fell by the wayside.

[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/world/middleeast/israel-h...

[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67082047

[hilux]

I used to work for a Bay Area startup whose claim to fame was that it was all 8200 alumni productizing 8200-derived technology.

[alephnerd]

Yep!

It was Shlomo Kramer (Checkpoint, Imperva, Cato Networks) and Nir Zuk (Palo Alto Networks) that started the 8200-to-entrepreneurship pipeline in the 1990s-2000s.

Shlomo was basically the primary reason Israel does so well in cybersecurity entrepreneurship.

There was some overlap with the IIT alumni network as well due to Rajiv Batra (cofounder with Nir at PANW) that caused the entire Enterprise SaaS space to be lead by Israeli-American and Indian-American founders.

[tyingq]

Might not be him, but there's a facebook profile with that name that happens to like an Israeli-built "publish book to Amazon tool", the Israeli Ministry of Defense, Palo Alto Networks, etc.

[ArunRaja]

> Email Id with unique id leaked

What's the unique id here ? SSN number / military id,...?

[NomDePlum]

His name