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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

#171

Post by tptacek »

harimau777 wrote: post #167

This seems like it would have the potential for a lot of collateral damage due to the possibility that modified pagers might enter general distribution. That is to say, how do they insure that a given shipment of pagers are only going to Hezbollah as opposed to some of them going to people like aid workers?

Who uses pagers? Aid workers carry phones. The pagers are deliberate opsec move for Hezbollah.

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#172

Post by CommanderData »

Sucks to be them, why they even use pagers is laughable, unencrypted or encrypted. Cell infrastructure is easily traceable.

I just feel sorry for the innocent lives involved in all of this, no one deserves to be caught up in either side of the conflict.

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#173

Post by kobalsky »

xenospn wrote: post #126

[flagged]

some minimal due diligence to check the electronics maybe.

in simple devices charging and protection circuits are usually logically isolated from the rest of the device, and you cannot draw enough power from them to damage the battery.

maybe they used a weird load pattern the screws with the BMS, but there should be fuses too.

I hope we get more info

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#175

Post by some_random »

netsharc wrote: post #39

It must be a combination of hardware (put a bomb in it) and software (trigger an explosion when a particular command is received) hack. Triggering an explosion of all devices is needed because if people started hearing about exploding pagers, they'd place their own far away from anything precious to them. Geez, I thought this kind of hack is the stuff of (bad) action movies. I wonder if there's a pager that was power…

The detonation signal could also have been completely out of band, like with Yahya Ayyash (as far as I know) which seems like the Occam's Razor answer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash#Assassination

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#176

Post by matltc »

Sharlin wrote: post #84
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

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.

Could be true but that requires a lot more steps. Need the materiel to be implanted, delivered to targets, then have a software payload execute, instead of just the last step. However, most battery packs for pagers im seeing are 650 mAh which isn't much energy at all. Two 18650s have almost ten times as much capacity, and they don't explode.

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#177

Post by bee_rider »

ChrisArchitect wrote: post #71

Was going to ask how common pagers were, but suppose still used by emergency services etc and especially in warzones of questionable cell network reliability

Although, if I was an intelligence agency or police force, I’d definitely give pagers a second look, right? Like they have uses but somebody picking a pager over a cellphone is doing something unusual—maybe something unusual and good, like running an emergency services organization, but still unusual enough to take a second look.

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#178

Post by colechristensen »

LinuxBender wrote: post #38
HarryHirsch wrote: post #13

This hack is the best argument against network-connected electric vehicles that there is. Imagine the same, but with tens of thousands of Teslas.

I don't think it would be quite the same as in explosive ordinance put into a device but it is very similar in that a mass hack could use the navigation system to target pedestrians and calculate the speed required to plow through them without losing control to maximize victim count. All that would be required in another remote hack as has been demonstrated on live highways in the past [1] combined with some form of…

A parking garage full of electric vehicles properly compromised (at least some of them) would be very ... energetic. Burning lithium batteries aren't precisely explosive, but they are still very angry. It is plausible that you could destroy a building with a chain reaction of battery fires. That is one of the safety concerns I think might not yet be fully accounted for (what happens when a bunch of electric cars are in a full closed lot and one of them starts on fire).

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#179

Post by sbeam »

If we try to do what we are best at here at HN, let’s focus the discussion on the technical aspects of it.

It immediately reminded me of Stuxnet, which also from a technical perspective was quite interesting.

I already wonder if this was anything that was planted in the devices perviously, or if the ones responsible had similar devices, and managed reverse engineer them and craft a payload to them, that could be sent over existing cellular protocols/networks and then, similar to Stuxnet, make the device exagerte some existing functionality to a point where it caused a malfunction? Thoughts on this?

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