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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

#641

Post by [deleted] »

passion__desire wrote: post #564
zelphirkalt wrote: post #537

They must really be in desperate need for more conflict to keep their population at bay. For Netanyahu certainly conflicts come at a convenient time. First he tried to swing himself up to dictator like figure, taking away power from judiciary, tens of thousands of people go to protest. Then October 7 happens. Suddenly a war keeps him in power. Now that that has been going on, and hundreds of thousands are on the stre…

I think this is the case of both sides knew about each other's plan all along and yet Oct 7 happened. What could be the reason for both sides to execute it. Just to find out what happens?

[deleted]

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#643

Post by CydeWeys »

jnmandal wrote: post #597
mmastrac wrote: post #365

That's an impressive supply-chain hack. Spend years showing how insecure modern telecom devices are and scare your enemy into going old-school, receive-only. Set up a shell company to sell pagers to your enemy's shell company. Give them devices implanted with a small explosive charge pointed inward, knowing they will be worn around the waist most of the time. Hack the backend server, send a coordinated page to all th…

> Hack the backend server, send a coordinated page to all the pagers at the same time. I worked on these before and I don't think you'd need to hack anything at all to send a page. Its just a broadcast. Especially if you had access to the receiver as they seem to have had, I can't imagine they compromised the actual Hezbollah transmission tower.

Yeah I mean it's basically just like mass-sending a spam text, no? All they need to know is the phone numbers of the pagers. Or even just the number range from which the pager numbers were assigned, and then spam the entire range. Spammers have simple enough software that can do all this; it doesn't seem like a sticking point for Mossad.

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#644

Post by CydeWeys »

aqme28 wrote: post #484
mmastrac wrote: post #365

That's an impressive supply-chain hack. Spend years showing how insecure modern telecom devices are and scare your enemy into going old-school, receive-only. Set up a shell company to sell pagers to your enemy's shell company. Give them devices implanted with a small explosive charge pointed inward, knowing they will be worn around the waist most of the time. Hack the backend server, send a coordinated page to all th…

> minimal casualties outside of your enemy. "Thousands injured." I'm not convinced it was as super-targeted as you claim.

You underestimate how many members Hezbollah has, and also, how unreliable these kinds of initial reports tend to be.

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#645

Post by donthatemebro »

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…

[flagged]

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#646

Post by ilikeitdark »

Question: what's the possibility of doing this with non-tampered with modern mobile phones?

Many phones today have a 5000mah battery, which I'm assuming could be triggered to overheat via a malicious app or webpage. Imagine this being used on a grand scale.

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#647

Post by CydeWeys »

barbazoo wrote: post #354
einszwei wrote: post #196

From Israel's perspective, this supply chain attack was undoubtedly a clever move, but I can't help but wonder about its long-term consequences. Although it was aimed at harming Israel's adversaries, third-party countries may now hesitate to involve Israel in their supply chains. There's also the risk that other major producers could replicate this tactic, potentially leading to further escalation in the region or be…

> From Israel's perspective, this supply chain attack was undoubtedly a clever move From The Guardian [1]: > Eight killed and 2,750 wounded Was that a clever move if you're killing "only" 8 potential adversaries? [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/sep/17/middle-ea...

I think the simplest explanation here is that pagers are small and light and don't have that much free space inside them, and it's hard to fit enough explosive into them to reliably kill people. The figures I saw was only a few grams of explosive could be fit in them. If you look at the photos and videos that have been coming out today you'll see what the injuries look like; they're not as catastrophic as getting shot with a bullet, or anything close to a real explosive with orders of magnitude more explosive in it like an artillery shell, rocket, aerial bomb, etc.

I would guess Israel would have preferred more lethal pagers, but the required amount of explosive simply didn't fit. So the resulting deaths are from the people who got really unlucky, whereas getting wounded was the modal result.

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#649

Post by jazzyjackson »

danielodievich wrote: post #560

There was a really dumb but also really entertaining Awkwafina/John Cena movie that I watched recently called Jackpot https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26940324/ . At one point in the middle of the movie one of the characters calls a 3 letter agency friend and asks them for a "Phone Strike on his location". There is a mob gathered outside of their room, and within 30 seconds everyone's phone blows up and the protagonists…

I love those two, thanks for the movie rec.

I have a working theory that real life 3 letter agency plots make it into Hollywood movies because intelligence agents and script writers hang out at the same bars. Likely a mix of intentionally planting tropes so that when someone claims the government is doing it they look like a conspiracy theorist who watched "The Rock" too many times, and retired folks having one too many whiskies and letting their secrets slip knowing that there's no way to prove it anyhow, and those make it into scripts just because they're good stories

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#650

Post by [deleted] »

DevX101 wrote: post #425
einszwei wrote: post #196

From Israel's perspective, this supply chain attack was undoubtedly a clever move, but I can't help but wonder about its long-term consequences. Although it was aimed at harming Israel's adversaries, third-party countries may now hesitate to involve Israel in their supply chains. There's also the risk that other major producers could replicate this tactic, potentially leading to further escalation in the region or be…

Right now one of the fastest growing companies is the Israel cybersecurity company Wiz, founded by founders and investors from Israel's Unit 8200, their secretive cyber hacking group. Seems to me a massive security risk for any US company to be relying on critical security to a non American founded companies.

[deleted]
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