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Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

reuters.com

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Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#62

Post by kwhitefoot »

matltc wrote: post #47

Guessing they compromised the devices with a firmware backdoor, perhaps to remotely trigger an exploit that heats up the devices battery to dangerous levels once a signal is received. Paranoid about this happening with my vape mod with two 18650 cells

That's enough to vaporise about 100 g of water according my back of the envelope calculations. Overkill? Or is modified for an entirely different purpose?

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#63

Post by wing-_-nuts »

gee_totes wrote: post #49

Maybe a dumb question, but I wonder if this was a software attack or IL was able to modify the physical pagers that are issued during Hezbollah onboarding. If this was a pure software attack, are only pagers susceptible? Or are we unknowingly carrying around bombs in our pocket, waiting for the counterattack?

There's no way the little battery in a pager has enough energy to do this. This is a 'supply chain attack' by the Israelis. An ingenious one at that.

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#64

Post by viraptor »

So either this was planned long enough ago to replace a large number of devices over time, or communication about a larger order has been provided to the enemy and fulfilled without suspicion. Either way, that sounds like a crazy infiltration effort.

Also, we can assume that anything sent to those pagers so far has been forwarded to Israel and now that channel is burned, right?

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#66

Post by mminer237 »

Circlecrypto2 wrote: post #42

I'd love a technical write up on how this is possible. Is it RF based or the battery being exploited?

Israel infiltrated the supply chain and inserted a bomb into the device configured to be detonated 3 seconds after a specific message is received. Then they waited x months and sent the page.

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#67

Post by rtkwe »

gee_totes wrote: post #49

Maybe a dumb question, but I wonder if this was a software attack or IL was able to modify the physical pagers that are issued during Hezbollah onboarding. If this was a pure software attack, are only pagers susceptible? Or are we unknowingly carrying around bombs in our pocket, waiting for the counterattack?

If the description of "exploding" and "tearing [a] bag to shreds" are accurate then it has to be a physical modification of the pagers, lithium ion batteries don't explode with a lot of force when they go up.

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#69

Post by RIMR »

The reports right now are that these were ordinary pagers and that some sort of software attack overloaded the batteries and caused them to explode.

But I work lithium batteries. I've overloaded lithium batteries before and let them explode for safety testing. The videos released of these things exploding on people doesn't look anything like what I would expect, especially not from something as small as a pager battery. You would need to seal lithium batteries in a metal tube or something to cause that kind of explosion.

I highly suspect that this was a supply chain attack, and that there's a high explosive charge hidden in these things, with some sort of radio backdoor that allows them to be detonated by whoever controls these things.

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