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Israel's Air-Defense Kill Switch

2007

In September 2007, Israeli jets bombed a suspected nuclear-reactor site in northeastern Syria. One intriguing detail from the attack was that Syrian air-defense radar failed to detect the warplanes. In 2008, IEEE Spectrum, a respected technical journal, reported that the Israeli Air Force had taken advantage of a previously undocumented "kill switch" feature built into chips of European origin used in the Syrian radar equipment. The account has never been fully proved, however.

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