Comment by rdtsc 3 days ago
> The most likely is either some explosive besides the battery, or something that looks like a battery from the outside, but is actually half explosive
That is the most plausible explanation. It can’t be an obvious thing or someone would notice it. If it looks like a plain battery pack, nobody would think of cutting it open.
Most (pouch-shaped) Li-Ion batteries just look like square shapes packaged in heavy aluminum foil, with some Kapton tape to keep a small PCB with protection circuitry in place. Any determined hobbyist could buy smaller batteries and the packaging materials off AliExpress to make something that looks visually similar but has lots of space left over for explosives.
With cylindrical batteries it's a bit harder, but ultimately they are just a cylinder with pressed-on end caps. You can disassemble them (lots of videos on youtube), change the contents and reassemble them.
It is pretty high effort compared to just sticking the explosives next to the pager's electronics, but I don't think the barrier to entry is actually that high
Pagers last for a very long time. Some one-ways can last for over a month. At that point, you probably wouldn't notice it's just over 3 weeks, or maybe think the product is lying in the advertisements and lasts less but not enough to replace the "company provided" one.
> Some one-ways can last for over a month.
More like a year or two off of a single AAA battery.
There are tons of more likely explanations for that, though, with the top of the list being "dang bosses bought low quality pagers".
And if they can make the combined package big enough that the battery life is still acceptable, it's even less likely that someone will pull the pager, notice that they should be getting "great" battery life instead of "just ok", and investigate deeply.
I read elsewhere that Hezbollah recently changed to this pagers to communicate, maybe it those who put the bombs bet on the fact their victims wouldn't have time to realize that the battery have shorter life than advertised
I recently discover explosive welding is a thing. It uses PETN packaged as a thin sheet.
Considering the tech industry of Israel and the bottomless military/security budget, this is very plausible.
Also considering that a plan like that must have taken many months/years start-to-end, this just makes me wonder what else is booby-trapped(?), fridges? laptops? microwave ovens? the next door flat? flower pots?
Stuff like that take the paranoia levels all the way to 11.
> Inside the battery is perhaps the best hidden, but you'd need to own a bunch of battery manufacturing facilities (expensive).
Do you?
What stops you from just taking a smaller battery and packing it with some plastic explosive into the typical "battery foil"? I'm sure the IDF is capable of doing that at scale.
Something along these lines is my guess. Focus on the batteries. You can replace individual cells with explosives and cause the remaining cells to overheat to start the explosion.
Most battery packs have integrated power management chips, so you could focus on modifying the battery firmware.
You could have another component send a message to the power management controller to trigger it.
You could also use the power controller's internal current sensor and clock to watch for a device event (power draw from the screen at a certain time or the power profile for a specific set of CPU instructions), giving you means to trigger it without modifying any other part of the device.
> You can replace individual cells with explosives and cause the remaining cells to overheat to start the explosion.
That won't work. You can use C4 and other modern plastic explosives as cooking fuel; they burn nicely. Getting them to explode requires a detonator.
The pagers in question is believed to be a dry cell operated model. It could be a rigged AA battery.
...oh no. They must have handed out those USB rechargeable batteries as an upgrade. The bad guys want to be able to charge it, so they would be incentivized to align the charge port with case back and explosives facing the user. Then the battery could be triggered by time since synchronization && backlight current draw && button press beep.
The explosive here could be perhaps just 8mm x 8mm x 8mm to do the sort of blasts you see in the videos. Thats fairly small, and could easily be hidden in a device.
Inside the battery is perhaps the best hidden, but you'd need to own a bunch of battery manufacturing facilities (expensive). Cheaper would be to simply remove some other component (eg. one of two speakers) and replace it.