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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

#331

Post by CommanderData »

mschuster91 wrote: post #294
CommanderData wrote: post #172

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.

> Sucks to be them, why they even use pagers is laughable, unencrypted or encrypted. Cell infrastructure is easily traceable. That's the point why they're using pagers: pagers are passive only. A cellphone can guide a rocket to its target, a pager just listens and cannot be used to guide a rocket, to act as a listening bug or confirm someone's presence (or absence).

Interesting, never knew this. Do modern pagers transmit any RF at all?

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#332

Post by dewey »

ofcrpls wrote: post #279
zelias wrote: post #248

I am for some reason reminded of this classic scene from The Wire [1] where a detective sells a trove of preemptively wiretapped burner cell phones to a drug organization [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDalKxcLQC8

Dark Wire by Joseph Cox came out this earlier in the summer that covers the 2010s version of this with an Android phone company being stood up as a replacement for Blackberries https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59644256-dark-wire

Really good book, I've just finished it a few weeks ago and can recommend it.

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#333

Post by pythonguython »

flutas wrote: post #158
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…

I doubt it has anything to do with the battery, pagers typically use the far more stable (and less energy dense) NiMH composition over a typical lithium one.

Most pagers also aren’t designed incinerate/explode when they receive a signal, so I don’t know if we can make assumptions based on what typical pagers do. Seems a lot easier to short a LiPo battery than conceal a tiny explosive. An explosive can be found, but they’re unlikely to find out that the BMS is bugged to short the battery to ground

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#334

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

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?

[flagged]

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#336

Post by MrLeap »

tptacek wrote: post #207
tke248 wrote: post #195

My guess is they infiltrated the pager supply putting the bombs in all pagers and triggered them with Hezbollah's own encoded message system so only the guilty parties would be effected.

Market data suggests that Lebanon is completely saturated with smart phones, like everywhere else in the developed world, so it seems likely that there are only "guilty" pagers (certainly in this shipment, but more likely in the region).

Many doctors all over the world still use pagers.

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#337

Post by judah »

chrisco255 wrote: post #272

While a clever attack it's also highly likely there was collateral damage to nonviolent or noninvolved bystanders.

Watch some of the videos, they are remarkably targetted. One man is standing at a checkout line in a grocery store, 2 women near him. He looks at his pager before it explodes. The women around him are unharmed.

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#338

Post by janmo »

diggan wrote: post #330
janmo wrote: post #302

Intelligence agencies put their bugs within the hardware of electronic devices you order online. If you believe being the target of an intelligence agency never order anything online. They will put the bug inside, especially if it is an electronic device such as a phone/laptop/TV/coffee machine. Best solution is to go buy it from a random store and have a good home security system. Also weigh your electronic devices…

> Also weigh your electronic devices laptop/phone to check if the weight differs from its original weight, it should not deviate. What kind of errors are acceptable here? Or maybe better, how accurate are the measurements given from the manufacturer? I have a iPhone 12 Mini for example, Apple says ( https://support.apple.com/en-us/111877 ) it should weigh 135 grams. Measuring with a scale of 0.01g precision (which is…

I guess it is better to weigh it just after the purchase from a random store and from there the weight should never change.

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#339

Post by mcast »

some_random wrote: post #185
sbeam wrote: post #179

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…

We can't really do much more than speculate right now, but it seems like the most likely answer is that a shipment of pagers was intercepted and implanted with explosives. Israel has done this before to assassinate a prominent bomb maker. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash#Assassination

It's pretty insane to see remote detonation technology used and implemented in 1996, considering cell phones looked like Nokia bricks and the RF hardware needed to implement this needs to fit in a pretty tight space in the phone.
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