Comment by ajsnigrutin

Comment by ajsnigrutin 10 months ago

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.

tptacek 10 months ago

It seems pretty plausible that the actual supply chain attack here would have been Israel subbing out whole shipping crates of pagers for sabotaged devices Israel manufactured itself, which would allow for arbitrary complex designs.

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markus_zhang 10 months ago

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.

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markus_zhang 10 months ago

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.

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londons_explore 10 months ago

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.

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- markus_zhang 10 months ago
  
  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.
  
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markus_zhang 10 months ago

Thanks, I wonder how does one do that. I'll probably need to read how pagers work.

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