Comment by spidersenses
Comment by spidersenses 3 days ago
>or firmware hack.
There's still the question of how the explosive capsule would have been triggered. It couldn't just explode at the first incoming call. There must be more to that.
Comment by spidersenses 3 days ago
>or firmware hack.
There's still the question of how the explosive capsule would have been triggered. It couldn't just explode at the first incoming call. There must be more to that.
Maybe they bought a large quantity of pagers from the same supplier and modified beforehand? I think a few grams of high explosives is good enough.
Just curious, is it possible to program the pins so that it triggers by wireless or satellite command? With that scale I don't think wireless is possible though.
the pager is already wireless. So adding functionality to trigger wirelessly (over the phone network) is trivial. And it can trigger only with a special message.
Yeah you are probably right. I'm an electronics newbie and don't know exactly how pagers work in wireless. I'm going to read some material on it.
Thanks, I wonder how does one do that. I'll probably need to read how pagers work.
My best guess is explosively formed penetrator in the display.
I don’t think wholesale replacement of the pagers was likely to work for a number of reasons.
They had to go one step up the supply chain.
The EFP display could be set to trigger on a certain message, or even the clearing of a certain message, which in devices without said display would do nothing.
The display is most likely to be pointed at the user’s face, or opposed to their waistline (EFPs sort of fire both ways but in one axis.
The battery, if it were a cylinder as would be likely, would fire tangentially, likely not hitting much.
A prismatic battery would make a good place for an EFP but difficult to interface with and likely requires a second compromised component.
Might be a hardcoded date and time. Does the legit pager messaging network give the time? If not, continually powered digital clocks drift slowly.
The microcontrollers inside the pagers probably have a spare GPIO pin, so they'd just have to modify the software and attach the detonating electronics to that gpio pin.
Since i'm supposedly "posting too fast", to answer the post below:
> Just curious, is it possible to program the pins so that it triggers by wireless or satellite command? With that scale I don't think wireless is possible though.
Technically it is, but requires additional electronics and antennas. It's much easier to just use the existing pager network and trigger when some specific message (or pager code) is detected. Paging networks are simple to implement.