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Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon
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Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon
#82The 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 batte…
> The reports right now ...
Propaganda is running at 400% on both sides, I wouldn't trust anything, especially not "we just hacked pagers and made them explode via software"
Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon
#83> The affected pagers were from a new shipment that Hezbollah had received in recent days, according to sources familiar with the matter cited by the Wall Street Journal.
Presumably someone, likely Israel, intercepted them before they got to Hezbollah and added an explosive payload that could be remotely triggered.
Hard to see how a remote exploit could detonate the battery, which was my initial thought.
Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon
#84Guessing 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
More likely this has nothing to do with the batteries and this batch of pagers was physically intercepted and rigged with actual explosives. A very concrete example of a supply chain attack.
Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon
#85Does anyone have a footage?
Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon
#86It wouldn't be a first
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash
> Shin Bet agents gave him a cell phone and told him it was bugged so they could listen in on his conversations.[17] They did not tell him that it also contained 15 grams of RDX explosive
Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon
#87This is going to be an interesting one... definitely someone (not a lot of guessing who) modified the pagers somewhere in the supply chain... As with exploding drones, this will become a thing in other countries too, either as a part of organized crime or general terrorism.
Another working theory is that it could just be an opportunistic cyber attack - compromising lithium batteries. Though some of the videos coming out look like a bigger explosion that just a battery going off: https://www.reddit.com/r/lebanon/comments/1fizgag/ha_member_...
Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon
#88> The affected pagers were from a new shipment that Hezbollah had received in recent days, according to sources familiar with the matter cited by the Wall Street Journal. Presumably someone, likely Israel, intercepted them before they got to Hezbollah and added an explosive payload that could be remotely triggered. Hard to see how a remote exploit could detonate the battery, which was my initial thought.
> Hard to see how a remote exploit could detonate the battery
If that is the case - we have a problem...
Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon
#89It's just a matter of knowing your battery's power management firmware. You can overload the power control circuits that pagers or smartphones by creating a massive surge (sending signals to the IGBT drivers) that will cause the battery to explode. If the battery is moderately charged, the explosion is devastating. Hacker teams from the notorious Israeli ShinBet know of many bugs of this type.
But how did just that specific software model explode and not the previous ones? Shouldn’t your case apply to all models then?
Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon
#90This is a pretty amazing exploit by the attackers. Either they had access to the pagers during shipment and installed malware or had access to RCE on the devices.