Comment by yamrzou 3 days ago
Why was this flagged? I vouched for it as it would make for an interesting discussion about the security of these devices and how this kind of cyberattack might have happened.
Are smartphones, for example, also vulnerable to it?
even that is not far fetched. This is a typical supply chain attack.
I've seen laptop and phone batteries explode with significant force on YouTube. It's called thermal runaway.
As much as I'd love to believe this couldn't happen without physical tampering, I see no good reason to.
They usuall burst with fire. You'd have to have hardshell battery with no venting, and likely no protection circuit, and a way to cause sustained load on the battery, without the user noticing the heat first. Eh.
A short on a battery with protection circuit installed basically does absolutely nothing to the battery.
I'm yet to see a video with fire and a lot of smoke at minimum.
> Why was this flagged?
Anything any particularly motivated group dislikes here gets flagged; always been this way. Thanks for vouching.
> Are smartphones, for example, also vulnerable to it?
I also would love an answer to this question. Up until 12 minutes ago, I would never have thought _blowing up_ hundreds of pagers simultaneously was a realistic scenario.
If anyone can make sense of how this actually worked I'd be grateful. If it can be done to pagers, it seems likely that it can be done to other networked lithium devices: phones, tablets, laptops, smart watches, cameras, drones, medical devices, toys, and even electric vehicles.
Lest anyone tries to deny this happened: There's video of two separate cases on the nowinpalestine Instagram page.
"Political" (including geopolitical) posts on here lead to an enormous amount of anger and noise and I fully get why they're verboten. In this case it's actually a fascinating issue that has a lot of crossovers with the domain of this site, but invariably the conversation would get overwhelmed with geopolitical noise instead of just focusing on the technical aspects.
98% sure these were booby trapped with plastic explosives or similar, meaning it’s a supply chain attack more than a cyber attack. LiPos exploding would be more sizzle and less instant boom, you can’t just hack your way through thermal runaway without all the smoke and building temperature first.
I am just out of the gate, but the videos show sharp percussive explosions and no lithium evidence. So C4 or RDX in the devices on a 'mod board' with the explosive disguised as a big capacitor or something. It had to be put into the devices. In order to justify an operation like this the explosions had to be near-simultaneous so the mod board had to have its own clock, which would be as accurate as the crystal in the clock circuit provides, maybe drift of +/- a few seconds since installation.
The broadcast pager network does not offer this level of time precision for a detonation message so as ugly as it sounds, I believe at the moment that 9/17/2024@3:30pm (or whatever) was preloaded into the 'mod boards'.
Perhaps the 'mod board' had the capability for the future time to be set with a broadcast message, but that introduces such complexity! It requires the page system itself to be compromised. The victims' paranoia served them badly in this case, a recent warning about cell devices and a lower tech 'solution' is rolled out and they would only trust one source, so all you'd have to do was get an explody batch into the supply chain with (reasonable) assurance that only Hezbollah members would get them.
In the coming days I'd look for clues in: The simultaneity of the explosions with times to the second // were any duds found and disassembled? // is there a separate radio receiver on the mod board (to set future detonation time) // when did the 'rollout' of the devices begin? // How many pager carrying non-members were injured and what were the circumstances ('medics' being one group) // Will suspicious broadcasts be discovered from logs or logged radio intercepts?
Given the people we are dealing with (I mean both sides) I am thinking that the operation avoided ANY covert channels at all and was a simple date-time bomb.
It got flagged because it is a duplicate. In order to focus discussion into one submission [0].
The subject is unfortunately likely to start a flamewar. I still think this should be on the front page because the technology and scope of this attack is unheard of if true. Israel somehow managed to weaponise hezbolla pagers by sending a message that caused them to explode. (Edit: i see the link i submitted has made it to the front page so it seems the moderators won't kill the story)
Dupes also get flagged, like in this case. This submission got [dupe] added as a prefix to he title.
The reasons were quoted in the media:
"Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah a few months ago called on his fighters, especially those who are on the front lines along Lebanon’s southern border with Israel, to stop using smartphones because Israel has the technology to infiltrate and penetrate those devices."
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2024/9/17/israels-wa...
I was wondering the same thing.
There might be other explanations than a cyberattack though. The pagers could have been prepared in some way before distribution.
From the videos, it looks like the explosions were quite sudden and remarkably violent for such a small device.
So in addition to people-hunting FPV drones, we now have the equivalent of exploding collars from science fiction movies like Running Man. I don't like where we're heading, but it was probably inevitable that technology would be used this way.