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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

#831

Post by lovelearning »

repelsteeltje wrote: post #153
IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #137

One aspect here that is not commented on but has long-term security implications: Assuming these were indeed Hezbollah devices, its likely every single Hezbollah operative now has an identifying wound, possibly a missing limb or wound at the hip level. The wound may be in fact, unmistakable. What happens later with the lebanese armed forces and with IDF, when they see the ops in the open, its anyone's guess

I might be misinterpreting, but news coverage seems to say that Hezbollah fighters as well as medical personnel were injured. That might mean that the attack was aimed at pagers rather than Hezbollah pagers. Such lack of precision would be what you'd expect in any kind of operation targeting so many devices.

Those medical personnel may also be members of Hezbollah. Doctors, nurses, and emergency responders can have ideological beliefs. For example, in my country, there are medical personnel with far-right and extremist views, some even holding leadership positions in such ideological organizations.

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#832

Post by alex1138 »

HL33tibCe7 wrote: post #684
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?

Since when has Israel cared about civilians or aid workers

Since the IDF has been shown to be intentionally cautious in their persecution of this war

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#834

Post by esjeon »

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…

Yup, Netanyahu is certainly taking advantage of the situation to secure his position, at the cost of innocent lives and the expense of the United States. As long as Israel remains committed to its purely-Jewish-state ideal, the conflict will continue, draining more money from US taxpayers.

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#835

Post by achow »

Israel's Mossad spy agency planted a small amount (3 gm) of explosives inside 5,000 pagers made by Gold Apollo (a Taiwanese company). "The Mossad injected a board inside of the device that has explosive material that receives a code." 3,000 of the pagers exploded when a coded message was sent to them.

Gold Apollo founder Hsu Ching-Kuang said the pagers used in the explosion were made by a company in Europe that had the right to use the Taipei-based firm's brand, "The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it"

Hezbollah fighters have been using pagers as a low-tech means of communication in an attempt to evade Israeli location-tracking,

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/3-grams-of-explosives-per-pa...

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#836

Post by raxxorraxor »

captainkrtek wrote: post #488
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…

> You have to hand it to them -- it's a clever strategy with minimal casualties outside of your enemy I agree it’s clever, but there are reports now of thousands wounded. Feels like a lot of collateral risk, if these people who were targeted were out and about (grocery shopping, bank, etc.)

These are Hezbollah pagers and Hezbollah only exists to terrorize Israel and it is their sole purpose. Of course there is still a danger of collateral risk, but I don't think it can get much more targeted.

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#837

Post by gamer191 »

torginus wrote: post #828

Honestly just slept on the thing and the story seems even more surreal to me now. How come they needed to replace their pagers AT ONCE recently? Has there been some great breakthrough in pager technology? I have a 5 year old phone and no desire to replace it for at least a couple years more. How come everyone had the EXACT same model? Even if the Israelis didn't compromise it, even the most incompetent intelligence a…

> How come they needed to replace their pagers AT ONCE recently?

Hezbollah recently switched to using only pagers for communication, because they were worried about Israel hacking their phones. It's likely they all bought pagers at the same time because of that, because I doubt any of them would have owned pagers already

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#839

Post by timcambrant »

torginus wrote: post #828

Honestly just slept on the thing and the story seems even more surreal to me now. How come they needed to replace their pagers AT ONCE recently? Has there been some great breakthrough in pager technology? I have a 5 year old phone and no desire to replace it for at least a couple years more. How come everyone had the EXACT same model? Even if the Israelis didn't compromise it, even the most incompetent intelligence a…

I agree with all of your questions. But covert organizations fall victims for this type of vulnerability all the time. Operation Trojan Shield and the ANOM network is one example. Operation Firewall and the ShadowCrew takedown was another. I believe LulzSec was taken down by bad opsec in the internal IRC channel as well. Bin Laden wasn't able to mix up his use of couriers and locations enough to stay hidden forever. It's easy for us to see the mistakes and point out that the criminals should have been more diligent or mixed up their operations more, but that would take more effort than anyone can consistently give over time.

Operational security is really hard and requires constant dedication which most organizations can't keep up over time. Eventually the most professional organizations will slip up and make some of the mistakes you point out above. It's very likely that someone has spies or informants inside organizations such as Hizbollah and Hamas. But this can also have been a lapse in standard operations that was finally detected and exploited by Mossad after actively watching for a long time.

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