[HN Gopher] Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Le...
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Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon
Author : logicchains
Score : 498 points
Date : 2024-09-17 13:15 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| yamrzou wrote:
| Why was this flagged? I vouched for it as it would make for an
| interesting discussion about the security of these devices and
| how this kind of cyberattack might have happened.
|
| Are smartphones, for example, also vulnerable to it?
| mandmandam wrote:
| > Why was this flagged?
|
| Anything any particularly motivated group dislikes here gets
| flagged; always been this way. Thanks for vouching.
|
| > Are smartphones, for example, also vulnerable to it?
|
| I also would love an answer to this question. Up until 12
| minutes ago, I would never have thought _blowing up_ hundreds
| of pagers simultaneously was a realistic scenario.
|
| If anyone can make sense of how this actually worked I'd be
| grateful. If it can be done to pagers, it seems likely that it
| can be done to other networked lithium devices: phones,
| tablets, laptops, smart watches, cameras, drones, medical
| devices, toys, and even electric vehicles.
|
| Lest anyone tries to deny this happened: There's video of two
| separate cases on the nowinpalestine Instagram page.
| jakeinspace wrote:
| 98% sure these were booby trapped with plastic explosives or
| similar, meaning it's a supply chain attack more than a cyber
| attack. LiPos exploding would be more sizzle and less instant
| boom, you can't just hack your way through thermal runaway
| without all the smoke and building temperature first.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| "Political" (including geopolitical) posts on here lead to an
| enormous amount of anger and noise and I fully get why
| they're verboten. In this case it's actually a fascinating
| issue that has a lot of crossovers with the domain of this
| site, but invariably the conversation would get overwhelmed
| with geopolitical noise instead of just focusing on the
| technical aspects.
| HocusLocus wrote:
| I am just out of the gate, but the videos show sharp
| percussive explosions and no lithium evidence. So C4 or RDX
| in the devices on a 'mod board' with the explosive disguised
| as a big capacitor or something. It had to be put into the
| devices. In order to justify an operation like this the
| explosions had to be near-simultaneous so the mod board had
| to have its own clock, which would be as accurate as the
| crystal in the clock circuit provides, maybe drift of +/- a
| few seconds since installation.
|
| The broadcast pager network does not offer this level of time
| precision for a detonation message so as ugly as it sounds, I
| believe at the moment that 9/17/2024@3:30pm (or whatever) was
| preloaded into the 'mod boards'.
|
| Perhaps the 'mod board' had the capability for the future
| time to be set with a broadcast message, but that introduces
| such complexity! It requires the page system itself to be
| compromised. The victims' paranoia served them badly in this
| case, a recent warning about cell devices and a lower tech
| 'solution' is rolled out and they would only trust one
| source, so all you'd have to do was get an explody batch into
| the supply chain with (reasonable) assurance that only
| Hezbollah members would get them.
|
| In the coming days I'd look for clues in: The simultaneity of
| the explosions with times to the second // were any duds
| found and disassembled? // is there a separate radio receiver
| on the mod board (to set future detonation time) // when did
| the 'rollout' of the devices begin? // How many pager
| carrying non-members were injured and what were the
| circumstances ('medics' being one group) // Will suspicious
| broadcasts be discovered from logs or logged radio
| intercepts?
|
| Given the people we are dealing with (I mean both sides) I am
| thinking that the operation avoided ANY covert channels at
| all and was a simple date-time bomb.
| hollerith wrote:
| >Are smartphones, for example, also vulnerable to it?
|
| Yes if Israeli intelligence gets their hands on your smartphone
| (probably before you buy it) and installs an explosive and a
| software-hardware back door.
| mandmandam wrote:
| I've seen laptop and phone batteries explode with significant
| force on YouTube. It's called thermal runaway.
|
| As much as I'd love to believe this couldn't happen without
| physical tampering, I see no good reason to.
| megous wrote:
| They usuall burst with fire. You'd have to have hardshell
| battery with no venting, and likely no protection circuit,
| and a way to cause sustained load on the battery, without
| the user noticing the heat first. Eh.
|
| A short on a battery with protection circuit installed
| basically does absolutely nothing to the battery.
|
| I'm yet to see a video with fire and a lot of smoke at
| minimum.
| menomatter wrote:
| even that is not far fetched. This is a typical supply chain
| attack.
| hollerith wrote:
| I never said it was far fetched.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| The subject is unfortunately likely to start a flamewar. I
| still think this should be on the front page because the
| technology and scope of this attack is unheard of if true.
| Israel somehow managed to weaponise hezbolla pagers by sending
| a message that caused them to explode. (Edit: i see the link i
| submitted _has_ made it to the front page so it seems the
| moderators won 't kill the story)
| andreasley wrote:
| I was wondering the same thing.
|
| There might be other explanations than a cyberattack though.
| The pagers could have been prepared in some way before
| distribution.
|
| From the videos, it looks like the explosions were quite sudden
| and remarkably violent for such a small device.
|
| So in addition to people-hunting FPV drones, we now have the
| equivalent of exploding collars from science fiction movies
| like Running Man. I don't like where we're heading, but it was
| probably inevitable that technology would be used this way.
| tamimio wrote:
| As mentioned in this thread by others, this is not a new
| attack vector and won't be the last. The only difference is
| the scale. And technically speaking, anything can be
| weaponized.
| xenospn wrote:
| The reason they're all using pagers is because their cellphones
| used to explode, so they switched to pagers.
| megous wrote:
| The reason is Pegasus and all that other high-tech Israeli
| turd that their tech companies produce to help target journos
| and human rights lawyers, and which is sanctioned/banned in
| some western countries (incl. the US) for this reason.
| xenospn wrote:
| I guess you're not old enough to remember Hezbollah and
| PLO/Hamas phones exploding occasionally.
| megous wrote:
| The reasons were quoted in the media:
|
| "Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah a few months ago
| called on his fighters, especially those who are on the
| front lines along Lebanon's southern border with Israel,
| to stop using smartphones because Israel has the
| technology to infiltrate and penetrate those devices."
|
| https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2024/9/17/israels
| -wa...
| qwertox wrote:
| Dupes also get flagged, like in this case. _This_ submission
| got [dupe] added as a prefix to he title.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41567573
| nhggfu wrote:
| any indication which brand(s) of pagers were in use?
| anonss wrote:
| The latest versions just exploded; not sure about the brands
| though
| oldgradstudent wrote:
| I saw a speculation on r/lebanon:
|
| https://www.gapollo.com.tw/rugged-pager-ar924/
|
| I can't find the link now, but it was based on an image of the
| back of burned pager.
|
| Edit: wayback machine link:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240529091558/https://www.gapol...
| tamimio wrote:
| It does look like this one, the page doesn't open so J assume
| it's the page.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| The ones that had explosives put into them.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Obvious #1 Question - did Mossad manage to feed Hezbollah a huge
| number of weaponized pagers - or are there pagers which could be
| rooted in such a way that the stock hardware can "detonate"?
| beardyw wrote:
| For standard pager I can only imagine perhaps some way to short
| the battery, but that sounds unlikely even as I write it.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Yep. Though maybe with _really_ -low-quality (safety-wise)
| batteries, and the description "detonate" being 99.9%
| journalistic hype...maybe?
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| This hack is the best argument against network-connected electric
| vehicles that there is. Imagine the same, but with tens of
| thousands of Teslas.
| mandmandam wrote:
| Not to mention phones, laptops, tables, smart watches, medical
| devices, children's toys, etc.
| lm28469 wrote:
| That's exactly why the "software hack" doesn't make any sense
|
| No battery powered gadget as ever exploded like that ever
|
| That's a battery explosion:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KR7_xwQbYp0
|
| That's a bomb:
| https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1836037485492629605
| LinuxBender wrote:
| 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 _AI_
| or _gaming engine_. A mitigating control could be more bollards
| near sidewalks and more hydraulic bollards on intersections
| that have a lot of foot traffic to confine the hacks to smaller
| blast zones. This won 't protect the occupants but maybe drive
| by wire car manufacturers could start adding a "oh crap" manual
| handle to physically disengage power and apply some type of
| physical friction brake.
|
| [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZVYTJarPFs [video][2
| mins]
| Log_out_ wrote:
| Not one backdoor? not even for the blues?
| colechristensen wrote:
| 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).
| hattmall wrote:
| Any of the smart plugs or other devices plugged directly
| into the grid could be intentionally compromised to start a
| house fire. Millions of homes simultaneously catching fire
| would be catastrophic. Apartment buildings where a fire
| starts in 10%+ of the units.
| hiatus wrote:
| Homes have surge protectors though that are out of band
| of the smart plugs.
| colechristensen wrote:
| This is a strong statement that probably isn't true. The
| power transformers in those devices usually aren't
| controlled and the things which are controlled will only
| sometimes be able to start fires. No doubt that some
| "smart" devices will have vulnerabilities that could
| cause fire, but just because there's an available
| controller does not mean there's an avenue to set fire to
| a device.
|
| In short, unless a device is profoundly poorly designed,
| there's no way to blink an LED so incorrectly that it
| starts a fire. (And many smart devices really aren't
| doing much more than that)
| tavavex wrote:
| > maybe drive by wire car manufacturers could start adding a
| "oh crap" manual handle to physically disengage power and
| apply some type of physical friction brake
|
| It depends on the manufacturer, but I think this is already
| the case with Tesla cars? The brake specifically isn't drive-
| by-wire, it's an electrically assisted hydraulic brake - so
| even if a malicious actor could get the car to not do the
| assist part anymore, you can still stop by pressing the pedal
| hard.
|
| I feel like bollards and other form of separating roads from
| pedestrians are unviable on the large scale. I hope
| manufacturers start focusing more on sandboxing any internet-
| connected parts of their software and leaving the whole car-
| driving part inaccessible from any of that.
| some_random wrote:
| It's almost certainly 15 grams of RDX.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Yes, some kind of Semtex or C-4 would fit the application
| ghastmaster wrote:
| It's worth noting that RDX requires a detonator. This
| requires more space in the device.
| diggan wrote:
| Not sure why this was flagged, it's certainly a novel way of
| striking the enemy, regardless of the political undertones.
|
| Reuters seems to have a bit more details, and is probably a bit
| less biased than current URL (timesofisrael.com):
| https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/dozens-hezbollah-m...
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| What's definitely novel is the scale, perhaps not the tactic,
| which has been used many times before (speculative assumption
| being that the devices were tempered with)
| __alexs wrote:
| It's not especially novel, it's just a lot of similar weapons
| systems (e.g. cluster bombs, anti personnel landmines) are
| banned these days.
| fra wrote:
| This may be the first widely reported deadly hack of a connected
| device. Wild times we live in.
| upcoming-sesame wrote:
| https://x.com/WachtelDan/status/1836038754756145515
|
| Footage from the hospital
| HeadlessChild wrote:
| That is some wild and scary stuff.
| algo_trader wrote:
| > The affected pagers were from a new shipment .. in recent days
|
| > some people felt the pagers heat up and disposed of them
|
| https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/hundreds-of-hezbollah-...
| lbeltrame wrote:
| Question for those with more knowledge on these devices: how can
| they detonate? The batteries?
| gomezjdaniel wrote:
| It could be they had a way to warm up the batteries until these
| explode
| mapt wrote:
| The batteries are the only major energy storage device there to
| breach.
|
| Clearly Israel has found a software vulnerability that lets
| them overload some otherwise minimally used processor and
| overheat the batteries. Above ~140f lithium ion cells go into
| thermal runaway.
| daedrdev wrote:
| It seems like they actually installed small bombs in the
| devices.
| tiagod wrote:
| How is it so clear to you?
| danbruc wrote:
| This article [1] has an image of the pager and a video
| supposedly showing one exploding in the bag of some guy while
| shopping groceries. From that I would suspect a supply chain
| attack integrating some explosive, that seems way too violent
| for just an exploding battery or anything else you would
| usually find in that kind of device.
|
| [1] https://realrepublic.com/encrypted-hezbollah-pagers-
| simultan...
| h2odragon wrote:
| they had to have had some extra components added: batteries
| won't pop like that, they haven't that much energy.
| h2odragon wrote:
| https://archive.ph/l6dpE
|
| one video: https://x.com/Breaking911/status/1836039436653519209
| o999 wrote:
| Primary news suggests its an Israeli cyberattack
| bhouston wrote:
| Cyberattack or supply chain attack? Who uses pagers? So a
| supply chain attack could have been the cause.
| vpol wrote:
| could be both
| piva00 wrote:
| I doubt it's just a cyberattack, the videos of the explosions
| indicate small explosives rather than batteries.
|
| Don't think we'll know exactly what happened until Israel tells
| the world or an independent investigation concludes but so far
| my impression is there was a supply chain infiltration and
| thousands of pagers with explosives have been distributed to
| Hezbollah.
| mzmzmzm wrote:
| Is there a pager model sophisticated enough to accept remote
| firmware updates (or whatever condition for a software exploit)
| but lacking a battery protection IC? Otherwise wouldn't sabotage
| elsewhere in the chain be more likely?
| danbruc wrote:
| It was most likely a supply chain attack integrating explosives
| into the pagers, this article [1] says the affected devices
| were from a recent shipment. The explosions are way too violent
| for malfunctioning batteries.
|
| [1] https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/hundreds-of-
| hezbollah-...
| anonss wrote:
| It was surprising tbh. Someone said on the news that they tried
| to control the short circuit and increase the voltage which made
| batteries explode??
| netsharc wrote:
| 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 powered off during the
| attack and if somebody will dissect how they did it.
|
| Edit: then again maybe the code is as simple as
| if (currentTime() >= KABOOM_TIME) { goKaboom(); }
| flutas wrote:
| 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.
| pythonguython wrote:
| 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
| Ancapistani wrote:
| A LiPo will burn, aggressively and hot, but they don't
| explode.
|
| To get a LiPo to explode you'd need to both
| puncture/rupture it and somehow contain the escaping gasses
| long enough to build up pressure.
|
| No, I'm as convinced as I can be that this was a supply-
| chain attack, and used a purpose-built "addition" the
| pagers in the form of an explosively formed penetrator.
|
| Given that an EFP is usually concave, I'll even go so far
| as to say I bet it was disguised as part of the speaker
| assembly.
| pythonguython wrote:
| LiPos used today burn because they have vent slits.
| Remove the vents and it's far more likely to explode. In
| any case, we'll probably find out in a couple weeks.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Hypothetically there could be scenarios where something as
| simple as control over the right NTP servers could trigger that
| code, right? I
| some_random wrote:
| 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
| hhh wrote:
| They're pagers, so it could also be a modification of the
| firmware to listen for a certain message (could it be as simple
| as a pocsag network where all of the pagers would get every
| message and only alert if it's targeted for them?)
| moduspol wrote:
| Cheap cell phones have been used as detonators for quite some
| time.
| ars wrote:
| I saw some videos of explosions, the pagers received some sort
| of signal or message that made the holder look at the pager.
|
| Most of the injuries were to the hands or eyes. It was a very
| very weak explosion - even people right next to the person were
| not harmed, just the person holding the pager.
| delichon wrote:
| Warning, under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations in
| the US civil fines of up to $500k per violation apply to
| software exports classified as related to munitions or military
| applications. You may want to consult an attorney before
| sharing such algorithms on a public forum.
| tptacek wrote:
| Well, James Mickens sure called this one.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| Could you explain for the uninitiated?
| tptacek wrote:
| https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf
| gromgull wrote:
| this is the funniest thing I've read in a long time.
| Everyone should go read it now!
| amonon wrote:
| The rest of his articles are also hilarious. Every time I
| come across them again, I make sure to re-read a few.
| Here's a collection of his articles:
| https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens
|
| Here's my favorite: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mic
| kens/files/thenightwatc...
| pbronez wrote:
| """
|
| In the real world, threat models are much simpler (see Figure
| 1). Basically, you're either dealing with Mossad or not-
| Mossad. If your adversary is not-Mossad, then you'll probably
| be fine if you pick a good pass-word and don't respond to
| emails from ChEaPestPAiNPi11s@virus-basket.biz.ru. If your
| adversary is the Mossad, YOU'RE GONNA DIE AND THERE'S NOTHING
| THAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. The Mossad is not intimidated by
| the fact that you employ https://. If the Mossad wants your
| data, they're going to use a drone to replace your cellphone
| with a piece of uranium that's shaped like a cellphone, and
| when you die of tumors filled with tumors, they're going to
| hold a press conference and say "It wasn't us" as they wear
| t-shirts that say "IT WAS DEFINITELY US," and then they're
| going to buy all of your stuff at your estate sale so that
| they can directly look at the photos of your vacation instead
| of reading your insipid emails about them.
|
| """
|
| Pretty wild that this mentions a mobile device supply chain
| attack explicitly.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| Ah yes, the Mossad / Non Mossad threat model :). Classic.
| dadrian wrote:
| Nah, it's like how the existence of Star Trek influences future
| development of technology. Did Mickens call it, or did the
| Mossad get the idea from Mickens?
| Circlecrypto2 wrote:
| I'd love a technical write up on how this is possible. Is it RF
| based or the battery being exploited?
| bluescrn wrote:
| "Intelligence agency intercepts batch of pagers and swaps out
| the internals" seems the most likely.
|
| If the footage on Twitter is legit, there was something more
| explosive than a battery inside those pagers.
| mminer237 wrote:
| Israel infiltrated the supply chain and inserted a bomb into
| the device configured to be detonated 3 seconds after a
| specific message is received. Then they waited x months and
| sent the page.
| itissid wrote:
| How is this possible? Are they overclocking the MPUs and just
| heating the batteries to the point of explosion?
| scandox wrote:
| Surely just supply chain infiltration and regular explosives
| no?
| scttwk wrote:
| Agreed, the story mentions that the exploded models were all
| the latest ones purchased in recent months
| lsllc wrote:
| Wouldn't this be too easy to detect -- for example tripping
| airport security (or other X-ray security systems, govt.
| buildings etc).
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| I think a state actor would be able to make an explosive
| look like a battery on x-ray.
| scandox wrote:
| Well if you have personnel who regularly carry weapons
| and/or explosives maybe those checks don't apply...but
| anyway this is mere speculation.
| bluescrn wrote:
| These appear to be actual explosions, not battery combustion
| (there's footage on Twitter of at least one of them going off,
| it's a detonation rather than intense burning)
|
| Definitely some non-standard internals in those devices...
| pogue wrote:
| Can you share a link to the Twitter post? If it's graphic,
| please mention so.
| diggan wrote:
| One (graphic) example: https://twitter.com/GlobalWObserver/
| status/18360589108615294...
| matltc wrote:
| 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
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| That's enough to vaporise about 100 g of water according my
| back of the envelope calculations. Overkill? Or is modified for
| an entirely different purpose?
| Sharlin wrote:
| 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.
| matltc wrote:
| 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.
| gee_totes wrote:
| Maybe a dumb question, but I wonder if this was a software attack
| or IL was able to modify the physical pagers that are issued
| during Hezbollah onboarding. If this was a pure software attack,
| are only pagers susceptible? Or are we unknowingly carrying
| around bombs in our pocket, waiting for the counterattack?
| mminer237 wrote:
| They 100% had a explosive added inside. Batteries cannot
| explode like _that_.
| diggan wrote:
| Assuming a lithium battery and control over the
| firmware+power draw, couldn't you theoretically make the
| battery output more charge than safe, leading to at least
| overheating and maybe more?
|
| I also find it unlikely this was just a remote attack rather
| than supply chain, but with little to no details we can only
| assume for now.
| mminer237 wrote:
| Yes, but compare a phone's much larger lithium battery
| exploding:
| https://youtu.be/8nz5ijXcckI?si=jpZOWIs3BIQTvVt2&t=31
|
| With a Hezbollah pager exploding:
| https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1836037485492629605
| tamimio wrote:
| Thanks for the videos, obviously something extra was
| added.
| viraptor wrote:
| Not really. This is about the worst your can do with a
| lithium battery in practice https://youtu.be/oieH2wwDGzo
| and that's a proper short in something way bigger than a
| pager. They don't explode like these were reported to.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| There's no way the little battery in a pager has enough energy
| to do this. This is a 'supply chain attack' by the Israelis. An
| ingenious one at that.
| aitchnyu wrote:
| Why waste it on a clever show instead of stalking their
| owners silently?
| piva00 wrote:
| Probably because they have been stalking for a while, and
| this escalation is a precursor to further action.
| Destroying lines of communication is usually done before
| military action.
| bathtub365 wrote:
| They're likely already stalking their owners via software
| exploits on their phones
| hersko wrote:
| The "clever show" has caused a mass casualty event of
| Hezbollah fighters. I would say it was an extremely
| effective attack.
| diggan wrote:
| > mass casualty event of Hezbollah fighters
|
| And non-Hezbollah bystanders. Yeah yeah, "collateral
| damage" and all that, but still, individually targeting
| people instead of accepting innocent deaths en masse
| might have been easier to defend on the world stage, but
| bit too late for that I suppose.
| flutas wrote:
| I think the intent was to disable a bunch of fighters
| honestly.
|
| Make the pager ring, they grab it, it explodes in their
| hand disabling them for life and making them useless for
| the soldier role.
| lxgr wrote:
| The entire point of using one-way pagers (instead of phones
| or other two-way communication devices) is that they're
| effectively impossible to locate.
|
| A supply chain attack could have probably added some sort
| of beacon, but that might show up on an RF sweep.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| I think the "clever show" was the point. The physical
| damage may not actually justify the investment here. You
| need the resultant paranoia and suspicion from Hezbollah or
| it wasn't worth putting resources into.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| NB: that's probably backwards. Batteries contain a _lot_ of
| energy, they just don 't release it particularly quickly.
|
| Most explosives have relatively _low_ energy density, however
| the energy they have is released far faster than with
| conventional fuels. By unit mass, TNT (or other comparable
| explosives such as C4, RDX, etc.) have about 1 /10th the
| energy as liquid petroleum fuels (petrol, diesel, kerosene).
|
| Though again most battery technologies also have fairly low
| energy densities. But those are probably roughly comparable
| with most mainstream explosives.
|
| TNT has an energy density of 4.184 MJ/kg.
|
| A LiON battery: 0.36-0.875 MJ/kg.
|
| Motorola pagers (a widely used type) seem to typically take a
| 3.5V 500mAh battery, which if I'm doing my conversions
| correctly (mAh * V * 3.6) works out to about 23 kilojoule.
| That would be the energy equivalent of ~5g TNT. A light
| charge, but one you wouldn't want going off on your hip.
|
| ( _Note:_ I 've corrected an off-by-an-order-of-1,000 error
| above, earlier read 23 MJ / 180g TNT. As I said, I'm not
| entirely certain of my calculations, which are using the
| Wikipedia energy densities noted and GNU Units.)
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density>
|
| Again, batteries won't _explode_ as footage of the presumed
| Israeli attack on Hezbolla members shows. But they _do_
| contain appreciable energy. It would more likely burn rapidly
| at worst case.
| flutas wrote:
| Also pagers typically use NiMH batteries, not Lithium. So
| take those estimates down another notch.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| My principle point was and remains _rate of release_.
|
| 200g of explosive on your hip will give you a bad day.
|
| Cut that and half and it's _still_ a bad day.
|
| As another comment notes, 15g of RDX has been used to
| desired effect:
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41568415>
|
| FWIW, NiMH comes in at about 0.41 MJ/kg, which is _within
| the energy density band_ given for LiON:
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density>
|
| But again, though batteries contain a lot of _energy_ the
| rate of deliver, that is _power_ , and in this case
| specifically _explosive_ power is far lower than
| explosives. It 's not the _stored energy_ stock that
| makes for the difference, it 's the flow rate.
|
| (Note also: my original up-thread comment had incorrect
| calculations, since corrected, in place at the time
| parent was posted and this response of mine was made.)
| amluto wrote:
| > Motorola pagers (a widely used type) seem to typically
| take a 3.5V 500mAh battery, which if I'm doing my
| conversions correctly (mAh * V * 3.6) works out to about 23
| MJ.
|
| Batteries should really quote energy, not charge, for this
| reason. The voltage is not a constant.
|
| But something's wrong with your math. Even assuming a
| constant 3.5V, that's 1.75Wh, and 1Wh is 3600J, so that's
| 6300J.
|
| 23MJ would drive a car a respectable distance :)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Yeah, I somehow managed to see 23328 joule and think
| "megajoule" rather than "kilojoule".
|
| I've edited my comment above, _and_ tried to prominently
| note the edit. The reduction in equivalent charge brings
| a typical battery down to a fairly low level, but still 1
| /3 of what was used to lethal effect in 1996.
|
| Thank you for catching my error.
| silvestrov wrote:
| Gasoline has 45 MJ/kg for comparison
|
| so it is a ten times that of TNT. Source:
| https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/ArthurGolnik.shtml
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Yes.
|
| I'd first learned that fact some years ago and it
| surprised me greatly at the time. I've since learned a
| bit about other energy/power curves and it turns out to
| be relatively consistent: you tend to get more _energy_
| out of lower _power_ systems, for a number of reasons,
| some fairly straightforward, others more complex.
|
| In electrical energy storage, this manifests in the form
| of highly-responsive storage (capacitors, flywheels)
| which can respond within the power cycle (that is,
| 50/60Hz), to batteries, thermal storage, kinetic storage
| (e.g., pumped hydro), and fuels, which can take seconds,
| minutes, or hours to ramp up, but can also deliver far
| more total energy.
| rtkwe wrote:
| If the description of "exploding" and "tearing [a] bag to
| shreds" are accurate then it has to be a physical modification
| of the pagers, lithium ion batteries don't explode with a lot
| of force when they go up.
| krisoft wrote:
| There are CCTV videos purported to show some of the
| explosions:
| https://x.com/warfareanalysis/status/1836041245996584983
|
| It is indeed not the kind of explosion I would expect to see
| from lithium ion. (Those usually are a lot more flame-y at
| least the ones I have seen so far.). But I'm not an expert.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Definitely looks more high explosive-y than all the lithium
| battery fires I've ever seen.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| This 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.
| anonu wrote:
| 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_...
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Nah, batteries don't explode like that... heat, burst of fire
| somewhere, sure... full on explosion, no way. This was done
| somewhere in the supply chain, devices were replaced,
| explosives were added.
|
| And israel will wonder why suddenly even more lebanonis want
| to fight them after.
| c0rn3l1us wrote:
| It'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.
| anonss wrote:
| But how did just that specific software model explode and not
| the previous ones? Shouldn't your case apply to all models
| then?
| glenstein wrote:
| Other comments here are suggesting it was more likely a real
| explosive put in as part of a physical supply chain attack.
| Anyone able to say which is more plausible?
| oldgradstudent wrote:
| The WSJ report claims that:
|
| > The official said some people felt the pagers heat up and
| disposed of them before they burst.
|
| Sounds more like a battery explosion, but it's way too early
| to tell.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| It is possible that there was an explosive planted, plus
| some sort of thermal detonator that was triggered
| electronically, or even that the battery was used as a
| thermal detonator to detonate an explosive.
|
| While the Note 7 exploded with quite a bit of force, they
| never caused injuries like these, and the Note 7 likely had
| much bigger battery than these pagers had.
|
| We won't know for sure until the devices have been
| examined.
| jonplackett wrote:
| newer reports saying 1000s not 100s
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/sep/17/middle-ea...
| gwervc wrote:
| > More than 1,000 people, including Hezbollah fighters and
| medics
|
| The CNN title implies that only Hezbollah members were targeted
| were reality seems different. It's crazy a country is capable
| of doing a "special security operation" on civilians of another
| country without any international sanctions.
| hersko wrote:
| If it was targeting pagers used for Hezbollah's internal
| communication then it would be justified, no?
| aaomidi wrote:
| If you make it acceptable to have these style of attacks,
| then they're going to be replicated against your own
| government and people.
| tptacek wrote:
| I think the ship has sailed on how far attacks will
| escalate in this region.
| nickff wrote:
| Hezbollah is already willing to shoot rockets at civilian
| targets; an attack like this is much more carefully-
| targeted than their average strike.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Hezbollah would nuke Israel if they could. You think
| they're above pager bombs? They just cant execute
| pcl wrote:
| Let's assume you accurately determine which thousand pagers
| are going to which people, and that you accurately
| determine which thousand are Evil Hezbollah Members and
| definitely not someone's cousin or whatever.
|
| Regardless of these (tenuous) assumptions, if you detonate
| a thousand small bombs, it seems fair to also assume that
| some of them might not be on the bodies of their intended
| targets, but rather outside on the counter by the shower or
| over by the car keys or something.
|
| So no, I'd say this is a pretty tough sort of operation to
| justify.
| xenospn wrote:
| You don't keep a top secret communication device on the
| counter . You keep it on your person at all times. It's
| not a personal cell phone and you can't risk it falling
| into the wrong hands.
| lm28469 wrote:
| That's a lot of assumptions you probably have no sources
| to back up
| xenospn wrote:
| This is a thread about Hezbollah pagers exploding. Does
| anyone here have a source, other than news reports about
| explosions?
| meepmorp wrote:
| People routinely leave guns in Walmart bathrooms. Leaving
| the top secret hezbollahpager on the counter is eminently
| believable.
| simoncion wrote:
| The pager isn't top secret.
|
| Pagers employ unencrypted communications and (because
| they are receive-only devices) use a broadcast system to
| deliver messages to the pager. [0] Israel is publicly
| very, very friendly with at least one very wealthy Five
| Eyes country, and may have less-public support from many
| other wealthy and technologically sophisticated
| countries. If Israel _happened_ to not have the
| domestically-developed capability to get a copy of every
| single page sent in an area of interest, they could ask
| their good buddies at the NSA, CIA, or other such global
| intelligence agencies to shunt that information to them
| in a timely manner.
|
| Given the organization's sophistication, there is
| absolutely no way that Hezbollah believes that the
| contents of their pages are secret. The worst-case
| outcome of a lost pager is that the organization
| temporarily loses convenient contact to the person at the
| other end of that pager. While this could potentially be
| operationally disastrous, it's more like losing your
| service weapon than it is leaving the plans for D-Day on
| a public bus.
|
| [0] <https://computer.rip/2020-12-15-weird-wireless.html>
| xenospn wrote:
| These are not some random rednecks at a west Virginia
| Walmart. They're professional soldiers of a military
| organizations handling a secure communications device.
|
| Not sure if you've ever been in the military, but when I
| was there, if I had left a secure device or my gun
| somewhere out of sight/reach and someone else got to it,
| I'd get in a ton of trouble and probably go to prison.
| piva00 wrote:
| There's a video of one that detonated inside a dresser,
| in someone's room. If there were thousands of those
| explosive devices some of them are inevitably,
| statistically speaking, not going to be with the intended
| target.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| It's war. Much worse things have been happening in this
| war already (e.g. Hezbollah explicitly targeting Israeli
| residential areas and killing civilians). By contrast
| this action seems much more targeted and justifiable.
|
| If your bar for taking action is "there can't even be a
| chance of hurting a civilian", then your army can't do
| anything, and your entire civilian populace is
| slaughtered when it's taken over by the enemy intent on
| destroying your country.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > it would be justified, no?
|
| It's never justified to trigger explosives when you have no
| idea where said explosives are.
|
| What if the dude if hugging is kid/wife/mom ?
|
| What if he's picking up his kids from school, visiting the
| local food market, &c.
|
| What if he's driving and end up crashing in a bunch of
| people walking on the sidewalk
| xdennis wrote:
| That sounds nice, but by that logic no bomb would ever be
| fired. Under international law collateral damage must not
| be excessive, but it is permitted. If it was
| unacceptable, evil armies would do what they want and
| good armies would never fire a shot.
| lm28469 wrote:
| When you drop a bomb you at least know where it's going,
| here you have no idea.
|
| Look at what's going on in Ukraine, if you can't tell a
| good from a bad shit you have to get your eyes checked.
| Hitting a column of tank isn't the same as targeting a
| civilian building
|
| Wars are always bad and there will always be war crimes
| on all sides, it doesn't mean that everything is equal
| daedrdev wrote:
| In WW2 20% of US bombs fell within 1000 feet of their
| target, which were often in densely populated areas. Its
| only modern technology that lets us know where its really
| going
| yread wrote:
| Would it be moral to make people who work in israeli army
| explode even when not in uniform?
| dijit wrote:
| Yes, they are belligerents in a battle.
|
| I am more pro-Israel in these conflicts, but you are a
| military target or you aren't, you don't leave the
| military when you remove the uniform, only when you agree
| to leave the military.
|
| In fact it is a common tactic of Hamas, when it is
| discovered they have passionately murdered civilians,
| that they immediately claim that it was an IDF soldier.
| Such as the case with Shanni Louk
| yread wrote:
| I admire the clarity of your moral compass. But
| consequently if that is ok, then targeting reservists is
| also ok, right? And since almost everyone in Israel is a
| reservist there are really no civilians in Israel only
| military targets, right? So, Hamas an Hezbollah blindly
| firing rockets are actually striking military targets
| with surgical precision
| dijit wrote:
| Gets muddy with conscripts.
|
| Gets decidedly less muddy with volunteers and officers.
| upcoming-sesame wrote:
| I would argue that this attack is more targeted than
| firing rockets over the border into civilian population
| diggan wrote:
| If it was targeting pagers used for Hezbollah's military
| wing then yeah, kind of justified. But Hezbollah is bigger
| than that, and seems this attack targeted the whole
| organization, not just the one that is commonly designed a
| terrorist organization.
|
| I guess for an American comparison it's a bit like
| attacking all republicans for the actions of the Proud Boys
| or any other militia.
| fortran77 wrote:
| It's crazy Lebanon can launch thousands of missions into
| civilian populations in a sovereign nation without
| international sanctions.
| xdennis wrote:
| Hezbollah are a paramilitary group at best, not civilians.
| And they are designated terrorists in many countries.
| diggan wrote:
| Hezbollah is a political organization with a paramilitary
| wing. The wing is designated as a terrorist group in many
| countries, the organization as a whole is designated as a
| terrorist group by not as many countries. France or EU as a
| whole, for example, consider Hezbollah a political
| organization and only the paramilitary arm as the terrorist
| group.
| fortran77 wrote:
| Including the United States of America. It's upsetting that
| so many people on Hacker News support a terrorist group and
| are unconcered about publicly professing support.
| viraptor wrote:
| So either this was planned long enough ago to replace a large
| number of devices over time, or communication about a larger
| order has been provided to the enemy and fulfilled without
| suspicion. Either way, that sounds like a crazy infiltration
| effort.
|
| Also, we can assume that anything sent to those pagers so far has
| been forwarded to Israel _and_ now that channel is burned, right?
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| This is why I find so ridiculous how Hamas was able to
| manufacture hundreds of rockets and prepare the taking of
| hostages for weeks, without triggering Israel's intelligence.
| It seems like it intentionally turned a blind eye, given how
| well prepared Israel was to respond and take advantage of the
| aggression.
| RIMR wrote:
| The 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 battery. You would need to seal lithium
| batteries in a metal tube or something to cause that kind of
| explosion.
|
| I highly suspect that this was a supply chain attack, and that
| there's a high explosive charge hidden in these things, with some
| sort of radio backdoor that allows them to be detonated by
| whoever controls these things.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > 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"
| RIMR wrote:
| Yeah, I'm getting the same energy from that claim as this:
| https://dtrap-blog.acm.org/2019/09/04/hackers-can-turn-
| your-...
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| 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
| drcode wrote:
| also make it hard to triangulate your location
| bewaretheirs wrote:
| Hezbollah reportedly bans its members from carrying cell phones
| and has them carry pagers instead:
|
| https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/pagers-drones-how-...
| aenis wrote:
| Thats an interesting attack vector on its own. Who does not
| regularly carry a phone with them these days?
| bluescrn wrote:
| That was a mistake. If they'd gone for the thinnest
| smartphone they could buy, there'd be no chance of anybody
| hiding a small bomb inside it.
| rdl wrote:
| Assuming you aren't joking: Pagers are receive-only, which
| is why they'd use them in preference to cellphones, which
| transmit even when just idling to register on cells.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| _Pagers are receive-only_
|
| This has not been true for some time. Pagers attach to a
| network in the same way a cell phone does. It is true
| they are more reliable in the receive only sense, as they
| can receive the broadcast message in the area they last
| attached to and the acknowledgment is not required to see
| the message but they do indeed transmit.
| blantonl wrote:
| Not these pagers
| bewaretheirs wrote:
| Pagers are immune to a number of threats that two-way
| communications devices enable.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| With a cell phone, the bomb is conveniently express-shipped
| to you by F-16. Or thoughtfully hand-delivered by the
| Mossad Postal Service.
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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.
| JPLeRouzic wrote:
| Is it some device like this one?
|
| https://cat-uxo.com/explosive-hazards/ied/pager-bomb-rcied
|
| It's disgusting that humans can invent such devices.
| wiradikusuma wrote:
| Does anyone have a footage?
| mminer237 wrote:
| https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1836037485492629605
| rideontime wrote:
| Revolting to see the replies cheering for the "wailing
| terrorist" who was just restocking produce.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| Neither of those videos show somebody restocking produce
| getting hurt.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| > 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.
| msq wrote:
| > Hard to see how a remote exploit could detonate the battery
|
| If that is the case - we have a problem...
| flutas wrote:
| > Hard to see how a remote exploit could detonate the battery
|
| Especially seeing as pagers typically use more stable NiMH
| batteries over lithium ones.
| lm28469 wrote:
| It 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
| busterarm wrote:
| Cell phones were much bigger in 1996. You would have a hard
| time with that with phones today, but pagers are still viable.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Replace half the battery with c4, you really don't need much
| to injure someone in direct contact with a modern explosive
|
| https://youtu.be/OOWcTV2nEkU?feature=shared
|
| https://youtu.be/LrUY8QbEcpM?feature=shared
| bgschulman31 wrote:
| This 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.
| pogue wrote:
| Israel has done this in the past by supplying parts to Iran for
| printers that would explode https://apnews.com/article/iran-
| israel-ballistic-missile-sab...
|
| I also seem to recall them using modified cell phones to blow up
| militants or use them to triangulate their location. I can't seem
| to find the article(s) about this, unfortunately.
| siva7 wrote:
| Seems like the israeli knew who these devices were addressed for,
| intercepted them and added explosives.
| scohesc wrote:
| The videos I've seen definitely look like it was more than a
| battery explosion - very high energy...
|
| Wondering if the pagers were intercepted and implanted with heat-
| sensitive explosive?
|
| The NSA has planted custom chips/firmware inside cisco routers
| after intercepting them - it's not a large jump to go to
| explosives inside pagers.
| elric wrote:
| I read somewhere that these were likely Motorola devices. Does
| that mean they are complicit in adding explosives to their pagers
| (wtf?) or is Mossad conducting supply chain attacks on such a
| massive scale? How do they ensure only the right pagers explode?
| Or did they randomly blow up a bunch of innocent pager users?
| ummonk wrote:
| It's absurd that this was flagged and pushed off the front page.
| Either it was a supply chain attack with explosives installed, or
| this was a hack that caused battery explosion. Either way this is
| extremely relevant to Hacker News.
| Neil44 wrote:
| This is true, however I can also accept that a thread on this
| is going to descend into a shit show.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Hopefully mods wake up soon, I want the technical gory
| details without the gory convo. If this is legit, it is going
| to be a fascinating post mortem.
| talldayo wrote:
| > I want the technical gory details without the gory convo.
|
| One day soon I'll write a eulogy for Hacker News, and this
| is a great contender for the website's epitaph.
| hammock wrote:
| @dang
| Bluescreenbuddy wrote:
| So no one has a credible source on how and why the exploded?
| Because the mostly likely answer is they were intercepted and
| rigged with explosives
| 581786 wrote:
| This being a hack is improbable in my opinion. If you see the
| pictures of the aftermath, the damage is too big to be the result
| of a lithium battery explosion. Moreover the devices exploded at
| the same time in different locations (won't happen if they made
| the battery overheat till explosion) HA probably bought a bad
| batch with implanted explosives and they set it off now.
| tamimio wrote:
| Pretty much, yeah. The hack was used only to activate it
| remotely, and in pager systems, it should not be a hard task.
| But I highly doubt it was only due to battery overheating. I
| have seen scooter batteries exploding before, and they don't
| burst as quickly as this one.
| wut42 wrote:
| I tend to agree with you. However it has been said (from wsj
| article) that "some people felt the pagers heat up and disposed
| of them".
| bluescrn wrote:
| There's footage on Twitter showing an actual detonation, with a
| bang. Not a huge blast (the man falls to the ground injured,
| but bystanders seemed unharmed). Definitely not the rapid
| burning 'whoosh' of a battery fire.
| anonu wrote:
| > This being a hack is improbable
|
| Your definition of hack differs from mine. This is hack in
| every sense of the word: supply chain hack, signals hack, and
| more...
| csomar wrote:
| Can we have this thread back and make it strictly technical?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Email mods at hn@ycombinator.com if you see a pervasive
| violation of HN's comment guidelines.
|
| Flagging and voting also help, but for wildly out-of-control
| threads, direct contact is more reliable.
| rsync wrote:
| No.
|
| The discussion should meander in any direction the votes and
| scoring allow it to.
|
| If the voting supports it, it is on topic _ipso facto_.
| robot_no_421 wrote:
| Not at all, that's why we have moderators. Hacker news is
| interesting because they stay focused on the right topics. If
| you let people just talk about whatever they want, you're
| just gonna get an inferior Reddit. Topic != "Whatever we want
| to talk about", the topic is very often the technical and
| technological aspects of a story or article. Talking about
| politics on HN is definitely "off topic".
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Love to consider only the technical aspect of terrorist attacks
| that's what makes this News for Hackers yes.
| sys32768 wrote:
| Sounds like Israel added plastic explosives to pagers and managed
| to supply them to Hezbollah. Then, I assume, they triggered only
| those pagers belonging to known operatives. I'm guessing some did
| not explode and we'll get to see the device inside and possibly
| understand the mechanism.
| xenospn wrote:
| I guess it's back to couriers with paper tubes? can't trust
| anything battery powered anymore.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| pigeons are still a thing
| xenospn wrote:
| next up: anti-pigeon drones
| patrickmay wrote:
| Hawks. They're called hawks.
| kobalsky wrote:
| 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
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container the same stuff you can
| put in a pager can be put more easily in a paper tube.
| tguvot wrote:
| not unprecedented
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash#Assassination
| myth_drannon wrote:
| That one was a bomb, today's attack was by heating the lithium
| battery.
| tguvot wrote:
| nobody knows what happened today.
| fortran77 wrote:
| If only Motorola had written their software in Rust, this attack
| wouldn't have been possible.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| 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
| repelsteeltje wrote:
| 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.
| 317070 wrote:
| There will be better experts here, but it is correct that
| batteries cannot explode like this, right?
| busterarm wrote:
| Pager networks are 100% clear text. If you're stupid enough to be
| using them to coordinate operations in 2024, I feel like you kind
| of deserve whatever happens to you.
|
| You're telling me nobody in Hezbollah watched The Wire?
| wut42 wrote:
| You can use cyphertext inside the plaintext. Seems to be what
| they are doing.
| busterarm wrote:
| You still have the metadata of sender and receiver. Your
| whole network is exposed.
|
| Also your message limits are 200 characters and likely highly
| susceptible to correlation attacks.
| wut42 wrote:
| sure. But everything over cell network is anyway more or
| less already exposed on the metadata front so why not go
| "low tech" ?
|
| And yeah it probably was more a "code" than cyphertext.
| busterarm wrote:
| Let's be fair. This is probably the communication channel
| for grunts that command doesn't give a shit about and
| they're using E2EE apps for command and this for grunts.
| wut42 wrote:
| Oh yes most definitely. Pagers are usually used this way
| in all of the other uses anyway (to quickly contact and
| inform ground actions like in emergency services).
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| Pagers are one-way, not bidirectional like cell networks.
| That's their whole point. Their HQ can broadcast a message
| and you won't find out who is the receiver, because pagers
| don't transmit, only listen.
| busterarm wrote:
| I never said they were two-way. I said you have the
| metadata of the sender and the receiver.
|
| The page data contains the receiver/pager address, but
| remember this is RF. Triangulating source of transmission
| on a frequency you are actively monitoring is table
| stakes for nation states.
|
| Once you flag receiver addresses there are techniques to
| work out who that party is, especially for a nation state
| sophisticated enough to intercept the supply chain in the
| first place. Correlating transaction data to people is
| tedious but doable. Even with receiver addresses only
| though you can work out how the network works and what
| cells there are and that's a ton of useful intelligence
| already.
|
| Also if the "code" being used was in any way breached it
| could be used to trick receivers into self-identifying.
|
| Israel just skipped all of that effort with "ring ring,
| boom" though.
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| A possible explanation of how it happened:
| https://www.lbcgroup.tv/news/lebanon-news/796406/understandi...
| tamimio wrote:
| I highly doubt that it's a result of hacking the battery power
| management. Lithium batteries don't explode the way I have seen
| these pagers do so far. They usually smoke or start catching fire
| before they explode due to overheating, which should've given
| enough time to dispose of them. But what happened is sudden and
| strong. Definitely, something extra was added and was activated
| remotely later.
| 4ad wrote:
| Footage of explosions:
| https://x.com/cherylwroteit/status/1836041510233444404
|
| From the hospital (NSFW):
| https://x.com/nexta_tv/status/1836052147646955935
|
| I am very surprised Hezbollah didn't think of supply chain
| security and didn't do the most cursor inspection of these
| devices. The post mortem would be very interesting on this one.
| harimau777 wrote:
| 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?
| tptacek wrote:
| Who uses pagers? Aid workers carry phones. The pagers are
| deliberate opsec move for Hezbollah.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| I've used them for DevOps on-call in the last ten years in
| the US, as a backup to phone-based alerts. It's far too easy
| to mess up phone DND settings, forget to charge a phone, be
| outside cell service, or leave a phone in the wrong room. The
| pager had a long battery life and I clipped it to my pants
| waistband. I definitely caught pages via the pager that I
| would have missed over the phone.
|
| If you're worried about the cell network going down, they
| serve as a backup comms device as well since they use
| different infrastructure.
| tptacek wrote:
| Presumably Lebanese DevOps on-call isn't sharing pagers
| from a shipment to Hezbollah from Iran.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Hezbollah is essentially a government entity in much of
| Lebanon, they totally would. Hezbollah runs schools,
| hospitals - it's easily the largest social services
| provider in large swathes of Lebanon. That's why it
| enjoys so much support, in many ways it was a much more
| competent alternative to the failed Lebanese government.
| tptacek wrote:
| People who work in schools in Lebanon carry smartphones
| like everybody else. Pagers are obsolete. Some doctors
| may carry them because they work when the cell network is
| down, but they don't all re-up from Iran all at once.
| Hezbollah carries pagers because they're one-way devices
| that are hard to track, which is not a problem a Lebanese
| school teacher has with his Chinese Android phone.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| What makes you think pagers are obsolete? When I worked
| at a big-three cloud provider (2016) we used them and it
| was a great fit for on-call requirements. I regularly
| find I don't have cell service when in large buildings,
| out in the woods, or even just random spots in US cities.
| The pager didn't have those issues, and helped us build
| highly available services. Does Fly use something
| different for on-call alerts?
|
| A quick search shows the US Government/Army [1] and
| hospitals use them [2] [3] [4]. I'm not familiar with
| Lebanese wireless networks, but pagers are certainly
| still used for these use-cases in the US.
|
| "Residents reported that they used one-way pagers for
| work-related communication more often than smartphones"
| (2018)
|
| [1] https://gov.spok.com/contracts-and-agreements/
|
| [2]
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10407125/
|
| [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6490267/
|
| [4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7426134/
| tptacek wrote:
| People still use pagers for specialty purposes, like
| being on call in disaster zones, or serving as a parallel
| armed forces in a country with a hostile neighbor who has
| infiltrated your cell phone network.
|
| I've said this like 5 times on this thread and feel bad
| for continuing to repeat myself, but: Hezbollah operates
| its own telecommunications network. The Hezbollah pagers
| probably do not work on the normal Lebanese telecoms
| systems. This in addition to the fact that Hezbollah
| procures pagers for its service members; it does not go
| to the Cricket Wireless store at the corner of Mousa al
| Sadr and Kouds and pick them up retail a couple at a
| time.
| John23832 wrote:
| You're pulling this out of thin air. You do not know
| this.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Lebanon has incredibly unreliable cell service. Anyone
| who needs to receive messages in a timely and reliable
| fashion would have no choice to have a pager or similar
| device. That would include many people in schools and
| most people in a hospital.
|
| > they don't all re-up from Iran all at the same time
|
| Who says anyone does? Hezbollah has 40k fighters, and we
| have reports of 2000 people being injured, so clearly
| Hezbollah, military or civilian, didn't "all re-up from
| Iran all at once", the numbers are more than an order of
| magnitude off for you to conclude as much.
| tptacek wrote:
| Reuters has specific shipments and provenance for the
| pagers attributed now, and also notes that the explosions
| were concentrated in Hezbollah strongholds (Dahiah,
| Bekaa, southern Lebanon), lending further evidence that
| these were not off-the-rack pagers.
| luckylion wrote:
| This is such a strange take. As if CIA operatives and a
| random teacher at some elementary school just both reach
| into a box with pagers and pick one because they're both
| employed by the government.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| If the US government was sanctioned to the extent
| Hezbollah was, someone like an elementary school
| principal would most likely have to ask a higher-up to
| provide them with something like a pager, which would
| likely have been smuggled together with others.
| luckylion wrote:
| You can buy mobile phones in Lebanon just fine, there's
| no reason why anyone except active duty members of
| Hezbollah would get their communication equipment from
| Hezbollah.
| frabbit wrote:
| According to the evidence Israel's blindingly clever hack
| "took out" one of those Ten Year Old Girl Terrorists. Guess
| they're "winning".
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/sep/17/middle-
| ea...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| With thousands of them going bang, that's unsurprising.
|
| As the page says, "after her father's pager exploded while
| he was next to her".
| frabbit wrote:
| That's right. Any evaluation or discussion of this needs
| to take account of the fact that it makes the perpetrator
| culpable of an illegal act of war in which the lives of
| innocent children are disregarded. There are all sorts of
| "clever" but reprehensible things warring parties could
| do, but are considered to be beyond the pale. So, this is
| a stupid action by a reckless, immoral party which will
| continue to have consequences for all of us -- especially
| if we don't deal with anything that we control.
| tptacek wrote:
| This is an indictment of all of modern warfare. Which,
| fair enough, but "war is bad" isn't an especially
| interesting argument.
| frabbit wrote:
| Again you are responding to an argument which was
| explicitly and clearly not made. The comment you are
| replying to asserts that this is an illegal act of war.
|
| Everything only works by agreement and adherence to
| rules: some explicit, some considered to be so blindingly
| obvious to a human that there should be no need to state
| them.
|
| Some of the rules around warfare involve doing your
| utmost to avoid collateral damage. In this case the
| collateral damage involves a ten year old girl.
|
| Please try to respond to the actual arguments instead of
| a cheap, easy strawman. It helps improve the quality of
| the site.
| mandmandam wrote:
| I will echo the flagged comment made by no_exit, since it's
| both factual [0, 1, 2, 3, etc] and relevant:
|
| > Given that the IDF explicitly targets aid workers, it's
| prudent for them to consider opsec too.
|
| 0 - https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/04/middleeast/jose-
| andres-wc...
|
| 1 - https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/05/14/gaza-israelis-
| attacking-...
|
| 2 - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/world-central-kitchen-
| aid...
|
| 3 - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/israeli-irish-gaza-
| mic...
|
| Edit: Since unflagged, will leave up for sources.
| ineedasername wrote:
| For collateral, I was thinking more along the lines of non-
| Hezbollah civilians right next to the target, or perhaps a
| building set on fire
| ars wrote:
| Here's a video of someone standing right next to the
| target: https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1836037485492629605
|
| They are unharmed.
| tptacek wrote:
| At the same time, I don't think there's any reason to
| disbelieve accounts (and video footage) of children among
| the injured. Unless you're sending operatives with
| pistols and killing targets individually, I don't think
| there's a way to do a strike of this scale without
| killing innocents.
| ars wrote:
| Actually this is probably more accurate than a pistol.
| Bullets miss and ricochet. Plus other people would fire
| back, leading to a gun fight and more deaths.
| ineedasername wrote:
| So 1-2 feet away is safe from serious injury resulting
| from the explosive force itself. Though the probability
| seems high at least some out of thousands had people
| standing close enough for worse, or further away and hit
| with shrapnel.
|
| I'm just commenting on injury though, not making a moral
| or ethical judgement. That's not an easy call when an
| opponent is embedded in a population of non-combatants.
| nicbou wrote:
| Nurses and medical staff, at least in the US.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2023/12/15/1219737658/why-do-doctors-
| sti...
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| not sure of band allocations around israel, but in the US
| pagers were long wavelength devices and, as such, could
| receive signals much further inside buildings than pre-wifi
| cellular bands could reach. again, band / frequency
| (wavelength) allocation dependent. but if similar there,
| pagers might get signals in tunnels whereas cellular bands
| may not, for one plausible conjecture.
| minkles wrote:
| I suspect that is an intentional side effect against the whole
| pager network. It is now totally compromised which means they
| can no longer use passive channels as a communication medium.
| This effectively shut down their comms structure.
|
| As for aid workers, they mostly use whatever low ball android
| phones they can get their hands on I know someone who
| volunteered out there and everyone uses them and Telegram). I
| don't think that will impact them at all.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Well, now that everyone knows it's feasible to hide a small
| bomb inside a pager, what's to stop people from checking
| their pagers for tiny explosives before using them?
| minkles wrote:
| Well nothing which is why people are spreading stuff about
| it being a hack causing the batteries to explode. Which
| disrupts everything with a network connection and battery.
| Adds confusion to the situation.
|
| As I said elsewhere this is a one shot attack. They would
| never be able to pull this off again at this scale.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Agree on the one shot thing. Makes you wonder if they got
| what they wanted, and if someone's pulling out their hair
| over wasting this attack...
| ineedasername wrote:
| It's effects might have been intended as much for
| psychological as lethal results. This specific vector may
| be a one-and-done tactic but Hezbollah members would be
| foolhardy not to regard every electronic device that is,
| at minimum, younger than $pager_age with suspicion. At
| this point even if it's a wired copper POTS line I'd be
| asking the intern to take my calls and shout things out
| from a few rooms away.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Can the average person tell the difference between a pager
| battery and a bomb professionally made to look like a pager
| battery?
| isoprophlex wrote:
| You only need to vet what the inside of a pager should
| look like once, and spread the knowledge around... using
| them will become more of a hassle, but not entirely
| impossible.
| willvarfar wrote:
| presumably the only difference between an explosive-laden
| battery and a normal battery is it's capacity. All else
| will appear identical. And tearing down the battery to
| inspect it destroys the battery.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Lot's of pager batteries are the shrink-wrapped cylinders
| with 2+ cells, so I'm guessing it might be possible to
| dress up one of those cells as a dummy w/ explosives
| instead.
| jjk166 wrote:
| The tampered pager likely looks nearly identical, and
| even un-tampered pagers will vary a little bit from
| manufacturing. It's possible an expert might be able to
| visually distinguish that a particular strand of wire is
| the wrong gauge or the soldering pattern suggests it
| wasn't made on the appropriate machine, but there
| shouldn't be something obvious.
| worksonmine wrote:
| Probably not but the average person can buy a pager with
| a replaceable battery and buy a new one over the counter.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Assuming the stock of replaceable batteries is large
| enough to handle them all being replaced simultaneously,
| that the replacement batteries are not likewise
| compromised, and that the battery is indeed the
| compromised component.
|
| Realistically just replacing the pagers is not only safer
| but also probably cheaper.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| I'm not sure how many bomb techs they have around, but I'd
| be pretty afraid to personally open something I suspected
| to have a bomb in it.
| flyinglizard wrote:
| These are pagers connected to Hizbollah's internal
| communication network. Why would they be used by the general
| population?
| harimau777 wrote:
| As I understand it, people are saying that the most likely
| way that this was carried out was that a shipment of pagers
| where intercepted and modified. My concern is that part or
| all of the shipment might not go to Hezbollah. Perhaps the
| shipment gets rerouted to somewhere else due to supply chain
| issues. Perhaps only half of the shipment was intended for
| Hezbollah. Perhaps a postal worker steals a few and sells
| them on the black market. Perhaps Hezbollah decides they have
| more than they needs and does something with the rest.
| Perhaps part or all of the shipment gets delayed and is
| sitting in a post office when it goes off.
|
| Basically: warfare via mail bomb seems like it might be
| irresponsible.
| alistairSH wrote:
| These aren't normal retail pagers, like the world uses (or
| used to use) for pager-duty? And Hezbollah maintains its own
| network infrastructure?
| tptacek wrote:
| Yes. Hezbollah is essentially the armed forces of Lebanon
| (there is an official Lebanese army, but it is smaller than
| Hezbollah).
| BurningFrog wrote:
| You can also think of them as an Iranian army occupying
| southern Lebanon.
| alistairSH wrote:
| I know what Hezbollah is, I'm surprised they maintain
| stand-alone pager infrastructure apart from the system in
| use by the rest of thecpeolle
| tptacek wrote:
| Maybe they don't? But they definitely have their own
| phone infrastructure, and since the switch to pagers was
| entirely about opsec, it would be very weird if they were
| dependent on civilian telecoms infrastructure for them.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Hezbollah is essentially a governmental organization, they
| provide healthcare, education, agricultural infrastructure,
| social services, etc...
| johnnyjeans wrote:
| No essentially about it. Hezbollah is part of the
| government, one of many political parties in Lebanon. Just
| like most of the other major political parties in Lebanon,
| they maintain their own militia separate from the Lebanese
| military.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I think this is something that many people may not grasp
| about Lebanon.
|
| The "There's Your Problem" podcast did an episode on the
| fertilizer explosion that leveled Beirut's port in 2020.
| The amount of breakdown that had to occur for that
| outcome was both astonishing... And utterly predictable
| given Lebanon's governmental structure, which is barely
| functional. It's less a government and more a power
| detente that hard-codes sectarian differences in the
| culture into the power structure, like trying to build a
| government out of a band of feuding warlords with no
| particular underlying agreement amongst the warlords to
| leave each other alone. Among other things, this makes
| their foreign policy heterogeneous; a given faction can
| just wage war without the government's consent, and the
| government lacks top-level power to do anything about it.
|
| (Ironically, one of the things that minimized the
| potential damage in the fertilizer blast is that much of
| the material had been stolen and shipped away before the
| explosion. Likely by actors with the tacit support of
| high-level government functionaries looking the other way
| and refusing to do enforcement).
| 93po wrote:
| I don't think Israel really cares about collateral damage
| brookst wrote:
| Everyone cares about collateral damage. The thorny part is
| how much to care... what is the calculus for how much is
| acceptable? Israel, rightly or wrongly, seems to be
| comfortable with around a 100:1 ratio.
| 13415 wrote:
| 100*x=40972-x
|
| x[?]406
|
| Sure...
| tptacek wrote:
| If that were the case, Israel wouldn't be intricately
| planting bombs in Hezbollah pagers.
| elliekelly wrote:
| The pagers do give Israel a certain veneer of plausible
| deniability that they wouldn't otherwise have if they had
| used more traditional bombing methods.
| tptacek wrote:
| Literally everybody in the entire world believes Israel
| is responsible for this. An Mk-82 bomb dropped from a
| bomber would have more deniability. This was a joke about
| Israel's tactical signature back when James Mickens
| included it in a Usenix Security throwaway paragraph back
| in 2014. There is absolutely no deniability here, unless
| someone very powerful is deliberately trying to frame
| Israel (which is not what is happening).
| elktown wrote:
| Gaza seems like a pretty effin strong data point to
| consider here?
| tptacek wrote:
| Not really? Part of what happened with Gaza and Hamas was
| that Netanyahu (and governments before his) spent a
| decade taking Hezbollah more seriously than Hamas (for
| good reason!). They are geared up for a precise and
| carefully-executed conflict with Hezbollah in ways they
| were not with Hamas.
|
| At the same time: 100% reasonable to look at today and
| say "if you can pull off an attack like this, why the
| fuck are you still leveling apartment buildings in Gaza,
| after having permanently crippled Hamas months ago".
| Like, there's a moral dimension to this! But I don't
| think that dimension is "feel real bad for Hassan
| Nasrallah". Play stupid games, &c &c.
| irundebian wrote:
| I don't see any contradication here.
| scosman wrote:
| They killed an 8 year old girl with this attack. I'm sure there
| was already a huge amount of collateral damage from 2000+ eyes-
| off-taret explosions.
| elorant wrote:
| Pagers could have certain security options that would interest
| only a military organization. We don't know at which stage
| these were intercepted. They could just as easily be targeted
| to Hezbollah from the beginning of the sale. Advertise
| something that could be catered to them and once they take the
| bait go ahead and booby trap them all
| jjk166 wrote:
| It would be easy to include a little microcontroller that can
| check what frequency the pager is set to. This allows you to
| target specific pager networks (government, military) while
| leaving pagers that are unlikely to be in use by targets intact
| for follow-up attacks.
| mathandstuff wrote:
| They didn't. Al Jazeera's headline was updated to read
| "Lebanon's health minister says 8 killed, 2,750 wounded by
| exploding pagers."
| moduspol wrote:
| I'm not sure why it's being assumed that they detonated all of
| the pagers. They presumably have unique device IDs / phone
| numbers that can be tied to individual people. For all we know,
| they may have just detonated the ones known to be in use by
| Hezbollah operatives.
| limit499karma wrote:
| You can't insure it. It is actual terrorism, pure and simple.
|
| "American University of Beirut withdrew the pagers from the
| medical staff this morning under the pretext of updating the
| system".
| aksss wrote:
| You can insure anything.
| welcome_dragon wrote:
| But can you ensure it?
| knallfrosch wrote:
| First: Innocent people can use their phones just fine and have
| their comms intercepted by the IDF. Only Hezbollah wanted an
| alternative to hackable phones.
|
| Second: If you distribute to Hezbollah and detonate already
| months later, it's unlikely many unaffiliated people already
| have Hezbollah pagers.
|
| The hit rate indicates the targeting was right.
| hanshenning wrote:
| These pagers were used by Hizbullah because, unlike mobile
| phones, they cannot be tracked. The people who had them were
| certainly not random aid workers, but people in the Hizbullah
| chain of command. This is also indicated by the statements of
| Hizbullah itself (which are themself to be questioned and not
| taken at face value), according to which so far one non-
| combatant was reported killed and no other non-combatant were
| reported injured out of a total of 4,000 exploded explosive
| devices. The CCTV footage also shows that even in a crowded
| supermarket, no one was injured apart from the Hizbullah member
| with the pager.
| matltc wrote:
| I searched 'pager batteries' on Amazon and most are NiMH, not
| lithium.
| CommanderData wrote:
| 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.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > 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).
| CommanderData wrote:
| Interesting, never knew this. Do modern pagers transmit any
| RF at all?
| toast0 wrote:
| There's two-way pagers which transmit, but receive only
| pagers can be broadcast reception only; there's no check-in
| / message acknowledgement, although messages may be
| rebroadcast to help ensure reception in case of bad signal
| conditions.
|
| You'd probably get some small amount of RF emissions
| though, most receivers radiate something as a result of
| using superheterodyne signal processing.
| sbeam wrote:
| 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?
| some_random wrote:
| 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
| minkles wrote:
| Exactly that. There is a video of a hole blown through a
| table surface with one. That is not happening with any off
| the shelf battery technology as is currently being heavily
| misreported. They were modified with explosives clearly.
|
| Of course there is paranoia being sewn now about hacking and
| the batteries which is likely part of the ongoing operation
| as it will disrupt anyone they didn't explicitly target.
| highcountess wrote:
| I'm not sure which image you are referring to but there are
| images of lithium battery explosions blowing holes into
| counters and faces. There are some linked here.
| hughesjj wrote:
| Not sure a wooden desk is equivalent to porcelain though.
| Porcelain cracks, just need a lot of pressure in a small
| spot to make a big break.
|
| That said, .... Really glad I quit smoking _anything_
| after seeing the damage a vape did to those poor guys
| rtaylorgarlock wrote:
| Exactly. Snowball's chance anyone could get a series of
| capacitors and transistor to do too much more than "let the
| smoke out," even with the largest influx of EM energy. Most
| batteries give pretty big warnings before they do anything
| close to explode, making this a pretty obvious 'attack'
| vector they utilized. I'm also happy to offer political
| opinions for anyone that wants to hear ;)
| cowthulhu wrote:
| > Kamil Hamad disappeared and it is rumored that he received
| US$1 million, a fake passport and a visa to the US.
|
| Given the chain of events detailed already sounds like it was
| ripped from a spy novel, I'm pretty skeptical of this claim.
| some_random wrote:
| I guess if your only exposure to spying is through spy
| novels you probably would feel that way? Nothing about this
| seems out of line to me.
| morkalork wrote:
| A Russian helicopter pilot had his family escape Russia,
| stole a helicopter, fled to Ukraine with it and cashed out
| on the bounty money offered. Then he was found and
| assassinated in Spain by the FSB. We are living in
| interesting times.
| asymmetric wrote:
| Source?
| morkalork wrote:
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68337794
|
| He was offered $500,000 to do it.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| > Then he was found and assassinated in Spain by the FSB.
|
| And that only because he seems to have lost his sense of
| self-preservation and basically lived his life in the
| open, in a Spanish town full of Russian ex-pats. And
| scoffed at the idea that he'd be safer in Ukraine.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| Questionable opsec is almost always the culprit. Even all
| these online black markets, it wasn't some sophisticated
| operation to catch them. Many times, they use the same
| username on another website and now there's a link. Hell,
| one of them used to send email verification for their
| black market using their personal email.
|
| It doesn't just stop there. A 49ers wide receiver got
| shot a couple weeks back because he posted on Instagram
| about buying a Rolex and he was lucky to survive. That's
| also questionable opsec.
| r721 wrote:
| Apparently the worst mistake was contacting his former
| girlfriend in Russia:
|
| >Exactly how the killers found him has not been
| established, though two senior Ukrainian officials said
| he had reached out to a former girlfriend, still in
| Russia, and invited her to come see him in Spain.
|
| >"This was a grave mistake," one of the officials said.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/31/world/europe/russian-
| defe...
| bydlocoder wrote:
| Or there's a mole in Ukrainian intelligence who sold him
| out
| air3y wrote:
| Didn't he kill his crew mates in the helicopter before or
| after landing in Ukraine.
| jakubmazanec wrote:
| This story maybe continues - the killed pilot was
| allegedly seen alive in Czechia. Though this information
| is unconfirmed [1].
|
| [1] https://denikn.cz/1510394/cesti-zpravodajci-resili-
| zda-byl-z...
| grotorea wrote:
| That does sound like spy novel stuff but it seems plausible
| enough? Dude was turned, and he wanted money and an escape
| to somewhere safe in exchange for cooperation.
| vineyardlabs wrote:
| You should check out any of the books written by Ben
| Macintyre, especially "The Spy and the Traitor". It turns
| out a lot of spy novels aren't that far off from reality.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Ahh so a simple supply chain attack. I was thinking it might
| have leveraged the built in batteries. But it was always
| unlikely, especially in a receive-only device.
|
| Still, if you have the capability of such a supply chain
| attack, I would imagine the rewards of silent surveillance
| (tracking, audio) would be of much higher value than this
| kind of attack where 3 out of 1000s targets were killed.
| alwa wrote:
| Though what a spectacular way to draw such a program to a
| close.
|
| I mean that in the sense of spectacle, of gruesome
| theatricality, not to glorify maiming people.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Fear is a powerful form of communication.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Most bugs can be easily found out by any competent
| counterintelligence team.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| True but so can explosives. Clearly they were not
| competent.
|
| Radio signals can be detected of course but it's possible
| to mitigate that a lot by only doing that at specific
| times and locations, or on request. And send the data out
| in batch. Ideally while you have the subject under
| observation so you know they're not monitoring for
| signals.
|
| The same way Volkswagen hid their engine manipulation
| from tests by recognising the test and adjusting
| parameters.
| wruza wrote:
| The level of competence usually correlates with how much
| in conflict you are not.
| ddalex wrote:
| 3 killed but thousands inoperative and hospitals flooded -
| I would expect an immediate armed escalation
| minkles wrote:
| Their comms and command infra is now hosed and all the
| operatives concentrated in hospitals. They are dead in
| the water.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Hezbollah has more than 100,000 fighters, so this would
| be what, one or two percent injured.
|
| Everyone has cell phones that they can use in addition to
| the pager, so I don't think it's very accurate to say the
| communications are hosed either
| bguebert wrote:
| Hezbollah has been warning its members not to use cell
| phones because they get targeted by using them too. Seems
| like the pagers were supposed to be the workaround for
| that.
|
| https://www.ynetnews.com/article/sya00qlswa
| londons_explore wrote:
| Which is dumb, because pagers are just as trackable as
| phones.
| tptacek wrote:
| Apparently not these ones.
| toyg wrote:
| They might have watched The Wire: you page Alice, and she
| uses a public phone to call you. Undetectable unless you
| wire all public phones in the city, or someone is dumb
| enough to always use the same phone (which is what
| happens in the series; they eventually switch to burner
| mobiles).
| wkat4242 wrote:
| To be fair, they rotate the burners in the series every 2
| weeks and it takes the police more than a week to get up
| on the new ones.
|
| It was cool to see that it was in fact an opsec fail (the
| guy buying the phones all over the country got lazy and
| bought too many from the same shop) to break through
| that. Pretty realistic. Like most of the wire in fact.
|
| Although one thing in the wire I don't understand. Pagers
| are really easy to intercept, anyone with a scanner (with
| discriminator output) can do it and could do it in those
| times. I did it many times during the days when pagers
| were still in full swing. I really don't understand why
| they needed a court order for that (in season 1).
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I just assume that ease of interception is tangential to
| the legal requirement for permission.
|
| Paper mail and landlines are incredibly easy to intercept
| and tap, but that doesn't make it legal.
| vel0city wrote:
| Lots of pagers operate in one-way only mode. Towers
| transmit messages without expecting acknowledgement a few
| times, pager is configured to filter out and only alert
| on messages routed to its ID.
|
| Sure, theoretically one can detect a receive-only radio,
| but its massively more difficult than detecting something
| which actively transmits.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Most pagers do, yes. They are also usually unencrypted.
| And due to the one way nature, even if they are
| encrypted, PFS (perfect forward security) is impossible.
| Meaning that if someone captures the encrypted messages
| they can decrypt them all the way back when the
| encryption key is obtained.
|
| But the impossibility of any kind of location tracking is
| definitely a plus of one-way pagers. Not just for
| terrorists. I'd get one if there were still a network
| where I live. It'd be really nice to be reachable and not
| be tracked 24/7 for once.
| vel0city wrote:
| While the messages are not encrypted, you just have your
| actual message coded. Have agreed on phrases and what not
| discussed out of band. Send dummy messages to throw
| people off and not know what is a real transmission or a
| dummy one. Is that numbers station just spouting
| gibberish or communicating with spies?
|
| The market closes at 5, dinner at the hotel, Grandpa will
| bring home the wine, bring your hat. Charlie 5 Alpha 2 4
| 7 3 Bravo. Maybe this is just discussing someone's
| evening, maybe its coordinating a group action.
| tonyarkles wrote:
| Many pagers are receive only. The tower has no idea who's
| listening; it just broadcasts out the messages that it's
| told to. Pagers are much less trackable than phones.
| pfisch wrote:
| How does the system know which tower to broadcast from
| though? Surely a pager message isn't transmitted from
| every tower everywhere.
| lxgr wrote:
| > Surely a pager message isn't transmitted from every
| tower everywhere.
|
| They generally are!
|
| Some systems required the sender to select a geographic
| region to increase bandwidth efficiency, or alternatively
| the pager owner to update their coarse-scale location
| with the operator after moving significant distances.
|
| The latter is what the old Iridium satellite pagers did
| (do?), for example. (Not sure how the new GDB-based ones
| work.)
| wkat4242 wrote:
| The new Iridium pagers are two-way as far as I've heard.
| Only the old ones were one-way.
|
| I think the service is finally being decommissioned due
| to the Iridium Next satellites not supporting it anymore.
| It has been supported for more than a decade without
| onboarding new customers though.
| lxgr wrote:
| > The new Iridium pagers are two-way as far as I've
| heard.
|
| Apparently that's optional:
|
| > Iridium Burst-enabled devices can be configured as
| receive-only so that no transmissions are made, a feature
| valued highly by some customer segments.
|
| (from https://www.iridium.com/services/iridium-burst/)
|
| > I think the service is finally being decommissioned due
| to the Iridium Next satellites not supporting it anymore.
|
| If that's the case, it would have been inoperable since
| 2017 - they deorbited the old satellites immediately
| after confirming deployment of the new ones.
| kelnos wrote:
| That's exactly how they work, actually. Or at least
| worked, traditionally. There are assuredly some two-way
| pagers out there now.
|
| But yeah, you'd usually pay for service in a certain
| (large) geographic area, and if you wanted to take your
| pager out of that area while on a trip, or if you moved,
| you'd have to let the pager company know so they could
| start broadcasting in the new area.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Not having a Hezbollah issued phone is very different
| from never using a phone.
|
| The idea that Hezbollah members have and had no means of
| communication other than pagers in a country full of
| cellphones and landlines is a farce.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| Now that their pager-wielding C&C is wiped out, all that
| cell phone traffic isn't dark anymore.
|
| Two birds with one pager.
| Electricniko wrote:
| Cell phones that, if distributed from the organization
| like the pagers were, could be compromised as well.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| The people with the pagers could be the more important
| people in the organization.
|
| And the 100k number seems quite exaggerated.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I stand corrected and Minkles is right. Hezbollah is
| defeated.
| minkles wrote:
| It looks like a command structure attack. There's now
| 98,000 people with no orders.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| That's what I am thinking. These were not sent to a few
| thousand random guys, but almost certainly the highest
| level targets that could be identified.
| xdennis wrote:
| They recently introduced pagers because they're less
| trackable than phones. Presumably the ones which have
| pagers are more important so its probably more impactful
| than targeting 1 or 2 percent of the regular terrorists.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| They have about 100'000 members, and this attack has
| killed about a dozen, and injured about 2000. Only one
| recent shipment of pagers was affected. I don't think
| they are unable to respond.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| How would this be an escalation trigger after a year of
| missiles and airstrikes with 1000 Hezbollah dead and 100k
| civilians displaced on each side?
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Face saving. It's easier to put a PR spin on something
| only a few people actually saw. It's going to be hard to
| convince their rank-and-file this isn't a bit deal and
| deserving of retribution.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| How is it different in terms of visibility than missiles
| killing and injuring more?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| A missile is a demonstration of military force. Everyone
| in the region knows Israel is capable of blowing up a
| building.
|
| This is a "we've got you hopelessly compromised as an
| organization" sort of demonstration that's far more
| humiliating.
|
| For a similar example, see the US response to 9/11 - two
| decades of war, taking shoes off at airports, etc. -
| versus the US response to COVID, which killed a 9/11
| worth every couple of days, but resulted in a "but I
| don't wanna wear a mask" response.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I agree that there may be some sort of psychological
| component, but his blah is not some thin-skinned
| organization that has been operating blissfully ignorant
| of what real death and destruction looks like. Nor are
| they unaware of the power of Israel's espionage Network.
|
| It's easy to sit online and make bold and vague claims
| like there will be armed escalation in retaliation. If
| you are so confident, I would be happy to make a wager on
| a platform of your choice. What do you think constitutes
| a major escalation? I would happily bet against a ground
| invasion.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > It's easy to sit online and make bold and vague claims
| like there will be armed escalation in retaliation.
|
| I mean, that's the pretty standard response in this
| conflict. Permanent tit-for-tat, back-and-forth, for
| decades/millennia depending on how broadly you count
| things. For a concrete example, Iran's April strikes.
|
| > What do you think constitutes a major escalation?
|
| Terror attacks on Israeli assets abroad - I'd be keeping
| embassies/consulates on alert - and rocket strikes
| against Israel. At least enough to try to save face,
| although the Iranian strikes offer a "good luck" for
| that.
|
| > I would happily bet against a ground invasion.
|
| By Hezbollah? Well, yeah.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| It seems we got to the bottom of things by putting
| escalation in concrete terms. I don't consider rocket
| strikes against Israel to be a meaningful escalation
| given that here have frequent exchanges for the last
| year. I dont think an embassy attack is much of an
| escalation either, when two armies are in a hot war.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I think Netanyahu's champing at the bit for escalation,
| and there's plenty of precedent for relatively small
| things triggering big responses.
|
| As a concrete example, the last big Israel-Lebanon war
| resulted from the capture of two Israeli soldiers in a
| border raid;
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Lebanon_War
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Do you think Lebanon will escalate by capturing
| prisoners? I agree that that could be an escalation given
| the context and history. That said, I don't know what a
| path to peace with Hezbollah looks like. It's hard to
| imagine Israel tolerating it imperfect ceasefire while
| Hezbollah continues to arm, given how that worked out
| with Hamas
|
| I think that netanyahu would be very happy to see a de-
| escalation on the northern border and it would be a big
| win for his cabinet.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Hezbollah has been escalating their armed attacks against
| Israel for almost an entire year, parallel with the war
| in Gaza. Every day tens of rockets hit Israel, almost the
| entire north of Israel is evacuated of civilians.
|
| I realize that this is not widely known, attacks against
| Israel receive far less attention in the news than do
| Israeli retaliations.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| As tends to be the case with this sort of complaint, it
| _absolutely_ makes the news.
|
| Quick sampling of examples:
|
| https://www.france24.com/en/middle-
| east/20240908-hezbollah-f...
|
| https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/4/hezbollah-fires-
| reta...
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw9y7wqn8j5o
|
| https://apnews.com/article/lebanon-israel-hezbollah-
| hamas-ro...
|
| It doesn't make a _big splash_ in the news because it
| tends to be severely ineffectual, but it has been pretty
| widely and continuously covered.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Yes, there are blurbs about it if you know where to look
| and are already familiar with the situation. But a small
| blurb once about Israel being attacked is drowned out by
| the literally thousands of articles about Israeli
| actions, which mention time and again every small detail
| or infringement.
| kelnos wrote:
| I don't agree; I think you're pushing some vague nonsense
| media conspiracy here. I haven't been following the war
| that closely, but I hear about Hezbollah attacks fairly
| regularly. I'm _very_ critical of Israel right now, but
| it 's not even remotely unknown that they're facing
| attacks from multiple fronts.
| ericmcer wrote:
| The "news" doesn't even seem to exist anymore. News
| providers have adapted to the readers only wanting hear
| their own views supported.
|
| Not only are there specific providers for specific
| worldviews, but major providers seem to spit out articles
| catering to every viewpoint. You can find probably find
| multiple pro Israel and anti Israel articles coming from
| a single news source on a single day.
|
| So, I dunno maybe we need some kind of cumulative news
| app to get any kind of meaningful idea of how things are
| actually leaning. Like an AI summarizing sentiments of
| the 20,000 articles on Israel in the last week to
| determine if the news is slanted.
| Jerrrrrrry wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBfBeo4nI2A
| bjourne wrote:
| Do you have a cite? Otherwise I think every study
| conducted in the last few decades have found that attacks
| against Israel is over-reported whereas attacks against
| Palestinians are under-reported. See f.e:
| https://theconversation.com/bias-hiding-in-plain-sight-
| decad..., https://theintercept.com/2024/01/09/newspapers-
| israel-palest..., https://lab.imedd.org/en/dead-versus-
| killed-a-closer-look-at...
| wkat4242 wrote:
| > attacks against Israel receive far less attention in
| the news than do Israeli retaliations.
|
| I think retaliations are pretty fruitless anyway. Both
| sides have been lobbing missiles at each other for
| decades. This eye for an eye thing keeps going even
| though both sides have run out of eyes a long time ago.
|
| Maybe talking might be an idea? Just saying...
| megaman821 wrote:
| Both sides are lobbing missiles at civilians? And
| responding to an attack on your civilians is fruitless?
| Maybe evaluate what you are saying.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Both sides are lobbing missiles at civilians?
|
| Well, one's hitting civilians with missiles, the other's
| hitting them with rockets.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > attacks against Israel receive far less attention in
| the news than do Israeli retaliations.
|
| this is false
|
| the rockets in northern Israel have been going on for
| years (as are rocket attacks into Lebanon), so just not
| much news anymore
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I don't think it takes much to 'flood' a hospital in
| Lebanon though. They country has been a mess since the
| big explosion. They barely have power.
| rdtsc wrote:
| They were probably at the risk of being exposed and pulled
| the plug before the word spread.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| That is indeed a possibility.
| stri8ted wrote:
| Given Israel's successful precision targeting of various
| senior Hezb members in recent months, I wonder if the
| pagers were initially used as such, but as suspicion
| mounted, and chances of an overhaul increased, they decided
| to hit the kill switch while they still could.
|
| Although as as per an WSJ article: "The affected pagers
| were from a new shipment that the group received in recent
| days"
| LegitShady wrote:
| The pagers were likely one way with a codebook for the
| purpose of minimizing tracking and information exposure.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Why not both? Location data would be relatively easy to
| collect and forward, audio not so much (much higher storage
| and transmission throughput requirements for very low
| quality source data given the limitations of piezoelectric
| microphones and the fact that pagers are usually worn on
| belts).
|
| If you're getting GPS data, collecting people's movements
| for a month or three probably provides 99% of what you will
| ever want to know. Once the patterns have been established
| you're into diminishing returns territory, while the risk
| of discovery goes up, which would neutralize the value of
| the explosive attack.
|
| The strategic value of such a perfectly targeted surprise
| attack is massive, notwithstanding the relatively low
| fatality rate. Injuries are expensive and often
| devastating, and the psychological impact is brutal.
| Logistically, Hezbollah (and many other organizations,
| militant or not) are going to have to review and/or replace
| part of their communications tech. That's a massive
| technical disruption, a significant economic cost, and
| risks further exposing supply chain information. It's also
| going to create paranoia about many other electronic
| devices, poison in the food, and so on.
|
| I'm not sure about the ethics of this. If one were certain
| that only Hezbollah officers were being targeted then it
| would be an acceptable kind of asymmetric attack through a
| novel vector.
|
| However this also seems to have impacted quite a few
| civilians, and there is a claim (unverified so far) that a
| hospital just replaced all its pager equipment a couple of
| weeks ago and would otherwise have been impacted:
| https://x.com/SuppressedNws/status/1836080190855795092
|
| If this happened in the US pursuant to one of the wars
| we've been involved in, we'd definitely be calling it
| terrorism and/or a war crime. It's a big strategic win for
| the Israelis in the short term but can hurt them two ways
| in the longer term. Hezbollah and other enemies of Israel
| will be significantly more motivated retaliate in some
| equally creative/unpredictable fashion, and non-aligned
| economic partners of Israel are likely to view Israeli
| products with renewed skepticism, hurting exports.
| tptacek wrote:
| It would be a bit rich for us to call this a war crime,
| since our standard M.O. for targeted strikes --- like
| everybody else's --- routinely kills innocent civilians
| in much larger numbers than this.
| colordrops wrote:
| Ok, so targeted strikes in the US by our enemies that
| have civilians as collateral damage is OK, is that what
| you are saying?
| rocqua wrote:
| The point was that the US government regularly accepts
| civilian casualties in trageted strikes, so it would be
| hypocritical for the US government to complain now.
|
| Notably, this doesn't apply to anyone who hasn't
| supported such strikes in the war against terror.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > this doesn't apply to anyone who hasn't supported such
| strikes in the war against terror
|
| or to any US ally; the hypocrisy has been around for a
| long time already
|
| if 20 Mossad agents had been assassinated in Israel _in
| the same way_, we'd be hearing the story told in a whole
| different way
| sitkack wrote:
| I think they burned an asset right before the last time
| they had a window to use it. Maybe even on accident.
|
| Dumb and cruel, could have used it to nearly the same
| effect by just telling hezbollah.
| rabidonrails wrote:
| A couple of things on this:
|
| 1. It appears that the AUMBC referenced replaced their
| equipment but that had nothing to do with this and their
| doctors weren't impacted.
|
| 2. Your note of "...other enemies of Israel will be
| significantly more motivated retaliate in some equally
| creative/unpredictable fashion..." is strange considering
| that this is already the norm. Almost all (perhaps all)
| of the attacks against Israel have been from terrorists
| targeting civilians.
| ajb wrote:
| It's possible that they expected a higher kill rate. It's
| also possible that the kill rate will turn out to be higher
| after the consequences of injuries have time to play out.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| For a supply chain attack.
|
| How did they make sure a large percentage ended up in the
| hands of the targets? Seems like this could hit a lot of
| random people, just anybody using pagers. Unless they had
| way to target certain customers.
| volkl48 wrote:
| I think you're assuming that all pagers of this model
| were being sent out like this. That's unlikely.
|
| Much more likely is they compromised someone in Hezbollah
| that was doing the ordering, or the distributor/vendor
| they ordered from, modified a couple thousand devices and
| sent them pretty much directly to their enemy, and only
| their enemy, to distribute among themselves. Then waited
| a bit, and set them off.
| mrtksn wrote:
| > most likely answer is that a shipment of pagers was
| intercepted and implanted with explosives
|
| I agree, there are photos and videos of extensive damage to
| furniture and injuries that go way beyond what a small
| lithium battery would NORMALLY do.
|
| Also, all the CCTV footage I've seen indicates explosions and
| not fire.
|
| It can be explosives planted, However it can be batteries
| modified to explode instead of burn&outgas. I recall a video
| of someone losing their lives when their vape battery
| exploded. IIRC the vape's metal structure acted as a
| container that enabled pressure build up and eventual sudden
| release.
|
| There are many stories about vapes exploding, some causing
| serious damage similar to these:
|
| https://www.gazettelive.co.uk/news/teesside-news/vape-
| explod...
|
| https://www.dailydot.com/debug/e-cig-vape-pen-explosion/
|
| Kind of makes sense to modify the battery because since they
| still need a functioning battery anyway and the space is
| limited.
| kergonath wrote:
| > It can be explosives planted, but maybe it can be
| batteries modified to explode instead of burn.
|
| That is not really a thing, from a technical point of view.
| Changing the chemistry of the battery (assuming that a
| suitably explosive one exists; these tend not to be
| developed very far) would just be swapping an explosive and
| not a modification. Doing something like adding some vessel
| to build up pressure within the battery sounds impractical
| (you'd need something _very_ resistant to heat as a battery
| fire goes above 2000 K), at which point it's not worth the
| trouble.
|
| The most likely is either some explosive besides the
| battery, or something that looks like a battery from the
| outside, but is actually half explosive on the inside to at
| least pass superficial inspection.
|
| This kind of damage really does not look like a battery
| gone wrong. It would have left all sorts of chemical
| residues and burned very differently.
| mrtksn wrote:
| You are probably right but explosives risk detection,
| either by the militants or by the airport security if
| taken to a flight to a country with serious security.
| londons_explore wrote:
| news reports suggest 1000+ of these devices exploded.
|
| In a country where lots of people would happily crack
| open the lid of a device to replace the battery or
| otherwise tinker, the explosives must have been well
| hidden, not just tucked into the case.
| ArnoVW wrote:
| it is my understanding that the devices had been
| delivered recently
| ale42 wrote:
| Detection by airport security might probably be avoided
| using the right type of explosive. I have no real idea
| about this, but I suspect that any nation-state with
| enough budget and know-how can manufacture undetectable
| or very hard-to-detect explosive devices. If the
| explosive is encapsulated in a sealed airtight container,
| which is properly "washed" after manufacturing, I guess
| there's no way to chemically detect the explosive inside.
| Not sure about how to avoid X-Ray detection but that's
| generally not the way explosives are actually detected.
|
| And, is the device anyway going to pass through airport
| security? I guess the owners are not really travelling on
| commercial airliners.
| mrtksn wrote:
| These devices apparently were distributed to thousands of
| operatives. I would imagine that people having those are
| some of the more elite ones and they probably will travel
| for business reasons, be it personal business or
| Hezbollah business. A few who choose to take their pagers
| with them(i.e. will not be heading straight home after
| travel, so brings the pager) are huge risk IMHO. Even a
| single incident may reveal the plot.
|
| I don't know how those detectors at the airports work
| exactly but they are probably playing cat and mouse game
| with the people who are into smuggling things and as a
| result they are probably aware of the more advanced
| methods like injecting things into the plastic.
| krisoft wrote:
| This is the reason why I think the explosives were most
| likely hidden in the batteries. Some explosives have
| similar enough chemistry that they cannot be told apart
| from legitimate battery packs by the scanners.
|
| This is a known threat, and this is the reason why some
| airports do extra checks on some travellers (for example
| asking them to turn their laptops on, asking them when
| and where they got the laptop and etc.)
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_electronics_ban
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| The scanners only test for the signatures of common
| chemical structures of explosives, like nitro and nitrate
| groups, which make up the bulk of mass produced
| explosives. There are many lesser known chemistries for
| high explosives that will not be detected by these
| scanners. Probably the best known example actually used
| by terrorists are explosives based on peroxide chemistry
| but there are several others.
| ValentinA23 wrote:
| A friend of mine who visited Lebanon (and the Hezbollah
| museum, he gave me a Hezbollah cap by the way) then went
| to Israel and was subjected to a thorough explosive
| material search. They basically swiped some kind of broom
| all over his body (with a focus on genitals) and put it
| in some device (some kind of spectrometer ?).
| rdtsc wrote:
| > The most likely is either some explosive besides the
| battery, or something that looks like a battery from the
| outside, but is actually half explosive
|
| That is the most plausible explanation. It can't be an
| obvious thing or someone would notice it. If it looks
| like a plain battery pack, nobody would think of cutting
| it open.
| londons_explore wrote:
| The explosive here could be perhaps just 8mm x 8mm x 8mm
| to do the sort of blasts you see in the videos. Thats
| fairly small, and could easily be hidden in a device.
|
| Inside the battery is perhaps the best hidden, but you'd
| need to own a bunch of battery manufacturing facilities
| (expensive). Cheaper would be to simply remove some other
| component (eg. one of two speakers) and replace it.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| Considering the tech industry of Israel and the
| bottomless military/security budget, this is very
| plausible.
|
| Also considering that a plan like that must have taken
| many months/years start-to-end, this just makes me wonder
| what else is booby-trapped(?), fridges? laptops?
| microwave ovens? the next door flat? flower pots?
|
| Stuff like that take the paranoia levels all the way to
| 11.
| exe34 wrote:
| a lot of people claim "we will strike fear in the hearts
| of our enemies".
|
| Israel makes them quietly shit their pants instead.
| rurban wrote:
| They did certainly not make them shit their pants, what a
| childish idea.
|
| They'll cause a big backlash. And the best they have are
| again suicide bombers in Israeli cities
| rdtsc wrote:
| I don't see someone like Iran or Lebanon being able to do
| that, but Israel has a great technical know-how and a ton
| of resources. Making custom batteries, with embedded
| explosives seems plausible.
| nwiswell wrote:
| > Inside the battery is perhaps the best hidden, but
| you'd need to own a bunch of battery manufacturing
| facilities (expensive).
|
| Do you?
|
| What stops you from just taking a smaller battery and
| packing it with some plastic explosive into the typical
| "battery foil"? I'm sure the IDF is capable of doing that
| at scale.
| vimax wrote:
| Something along these lines is my guess. Focus on the
| batteries. You can replace individual cells with
| explosives and cause the remaining cells to overheat to
| start the explosion.
|
| Most battery packs have integrated power management
| chips, so you could focus on modifying the battery
| firmware.
|
| You could have another component send a message to the
| power management controller to trigger it.
|
| You could also use the power controller's internal
| current sensor and clock to watch for a device event
| (power draw from the screen at a certain time or the
| power profile for a specific set of CPU instructions),
| giving you means to trigger it without modifying any
| other part of the device.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Most (pouch-shaped) Li-Ion batteries just look like
| square shapes packaged in heavy aluminum foil, with some
| Kapton tape to keep a small PCB with protection circuitry
| in place. Any determined hobbyist could buy smaller
| batteries and the packaging materials off AliExpress to
| make something that looks visually similar but has lots
| of space left over for explosives.
|
| With cylindrical batteries it's a bit harder, but
| ultimately they are just a cylinder with pressed-on end
| caps. You can disassemble them (lots of videos on
| youtube), change the contents and reassemble them.
|
| It is pretty high effort compared to just sticking the
| explosives next to the pager's electronics, but I don't
| think the barrier to entry is actually that high
| Bluestein wrote:
| > packaging materials off AliExpress to make something
| that looks visually similar but has lots of space left
| over for explosives.
|
| But this, arguably, would be detectable, through low
| battery life?
| viraptor wrote:
| Pagers last for a very long time. Some one-ways can last
| for over a month. At that point, you probably wouldn't
| notice it's just over 3 weeks, or maybe think the product
| is lying in the advertisements and lasts less but not
| enough to replace the "company provided" one.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| There are tons of more likely explanations for that,
| though, with the top of the list being "dang bosses
| bought low quality pagers".
|
| And if they can make the combined package big enough that
| the battery life is still acceptable, it's even less
| likely that someone will pull the pager, notice that they
| should be getting "great" battery life instead of "just
| ok", and investigate deeply.
| baud147258 wrote:
| I read elsewhere that Hezbollah recently changed to this
| pagers to communicate, maybe it those who put the bombs
| bet on the fact their victims wouldn't have time to
| realize that the battery have shorter life than
| advertised
| _xerces_ wrote:
| Not impossible they modified the firmware to improve
| battery life - look how sophisticated Stuxnet was.
| ValentinA23 wrote:
| I recently discover explosive welding is a thing. It uses
| PETN packaged as a thin sheet.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detasheet
| bragr wrote:
| A quick google search reveals multiple battery
| manufacturing facilities in Israel, including domestic
| and foreign owned corporations. A special order of
| batteries seems very plausible.
| numpad0 wrote:
| The pagers in question is believed to be a dry cell
| operated model. It could be a rigged AA battery.
|
| ...oh no. They must have handed out those USB
| rechargeable batteries as an upgrade. The bad guys want
| to be able to charge it, so they would be incentivized to
| align the charge port with case back and explosives
| facing the user. Then the battery could be triggered by
| time since synchronization && backlight current draw &&
| button press beep.
| delfinom wrote:
| I work in the battery space.
|
| All you have to do is build replacement batteries without
| the pressure relief vents. You can easily get a Chinese
| manufacture to do this for a fee and properly some
| complaining about how stupid it is to do.
|
| Then wrap it in some nichrome wire and have a micro run
| some power through it. The nichrome wire will overheat
| the cell really quickly causing the cell to rapidly over
| pressurize and boom.
|
| Small pouch or prismatic cells that would be used at the
| size of a pager generally won't burn. And I speak from
| experience of doing stupid shit to them in the name of
| testing, nothing like using the nail puller side of a
| hammer to puncture them, or rigging up a fixture with 3
| concrete nail guns to shoot it or well, fun stuff
| mrtksn wrote:
| Very interesting, so the battery modification is
| plausible it seems.
| highcountess wrote:
| I agree with this theory even though I am not even sure
| it would require a specific modification like the
| mentioned heating wire, if you can simply use the
| existing circuit with some instruction to cause component
| overheating with the same effect.
|
| Another reason I do not believe it was an explosive is
| that a clandestine explosive installation would have
| resulted in far greater damage and included shrapnel.
| Because why would you not install very high explosives
| and shrapnel in a shape charge that directed the
| explosion into the likely body of the wearer if you are
| taking the risk of intercepting and making a physical
| modification.
|
| This is also less Stuxnet and more infiltrating insecure
| systems of vehicles to drive by wire accelerate cars into
| objects. There have been examples of this
| zdragnar wrote:
| A shape charge would be pointless because you can't
| guarantee how the device is worn- one news article
| mentioned most people carry them in their pockets, so a
| shape charge would be blowing most of the energy away
| from the target in 50% of the cases.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| A shaped charge need not be unidirectional. It could be
| focuses along an axis, resulting in a two-way explosion
| that would be more damaging than a symmetrical one. Two
| copper disks on either side of the charge would
| constitute a functional two-way shaped charged.
| fhub wrote:
| I think the grocery store security video supports the two
| directions idea. If you watch carefully it looks like a
| pressure wave away from the target and clearly something
| takes the target down. Perhaps a pressure wave in the
| opposite direction too.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| With a pager you can be pretty sure the target will be
| holding it with one hand and looking at the screen.
| Reports indicate the pagers beeped shortly before they
| went boom. So if the blast is focused in the plane normal
| to the screen that would focus it into the hand and face
| of the target. No idea whether that's actually a good
| idea or not.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Doing much more damage 50% of the time might be more
| effective, if an undirected explosion is too weak to kill
| anyone but a directed (and lucky) one could.
| ValentinA23 wrote:
| I've seen some videos. Shattered hips, abdominal wounds,
| hands without fingers. I haven't seen any dead person,
| just maimed bodies. Mission successful I guess. Oh and
| one kid.
| efitz wrote:
| > a clandestine explosive installation would have
| resulted in far greater damage and included shrapnel
|
| No and not much. The amount of explosion you get is
| proportional to the amount of explosives used. Small
| amount of explosives == small explosion.
|
| Shrapnel is specifically engineered into explosive
| military weapons - it is not an innate property of
| explosive reactions. If you want a lot of shrapnel you
| have to design the case to fragment (e.g. grenades) or
| pack the area around the explosive with the stuff you
| want to become shrapnel (as with many bombers packing
| nails and screws and bolts etc., around their bombs). A
| small explosion in a mostly plastic device will result in
| a small amount of small pieces of plastic being
| scattered, which might harm bystanders but is by no means
| guaranteed or even intended to do so.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| It would seem if they're going to all this trouble in the
| first place to design a substitute case of materials that
| had good shrapnel effects.
| dboreham wrote:
| Ok well someone's on some TLA's list now.
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| How do you ensure they all blow up at once?
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| > Then wrap it in some nichrome wire and have a micro run
| some power through it.
|
| Presumably some software that triggers this?
| mrtksn wrote:
| I see some reports claiming that the trigger message was
| "07734 58008" but hard to tell if all these accounts are
| serious.
|
| My guess would be that not only the battery but also the
| main board was modified to initiate the action.
|
| edit: why do you think I'm not sure if they are serious?
| Calculator jokes are not a niche humor :)
| dllthomas wrote:
| > I see some reports claiming that the trigger message
| was "07734 58008" but hard to tell if all these accounts
| are serious.
|
| Clearly someone's not being serious.
| dogfighter75 wrote:
| It's extremely hard to tell if these accounts are, in
| fact, serious
| dotancohen wrote:
| 07734 58008 means "Boobs, hello". That does not seems
| serious.
| dllthomas wrote:
| The accounts may be serious (even accurate!) but whoever
| chose the numbers was not being serious in their choice
| of number. Or it's quite the coincidence.
| roywiggins wrote:
| https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=58008
| UberFly wrote:
| Good catch. Your 3rd grade, calculator-using self is
| serving you well.
| efitz wrote:
| Modified firmware that triggers on a receipt of a
| particular message and/or from a particular number?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Why was this dinged?
|
| Is the information wrong?
| gizmo wrote:
| Explosions are essentially about extremely rapid
| expansion of gasses. I don't see how a battery, even one
| that is rigged to fail, can explode in an instant.
| Shorting out, overheating, and ultimately exploding
| because the battery compartment can no longer contain the
| expansion has got to be too slow by many orders of
| magnitude. Your theory makes no sense to me.
| Retr0id wrote:
| Pressure vessels without a pressure-relief system explode
| once sufficiently pressurized.
| kelnos wrote:
| Sure, but can you get 1,000 of them to explode
| simultaneously that way? You'd think there'd be some
| variation in the time of explosion, at least by tens of
| minutes or hours, maybe even by days.
| loodish wrote:
| Shorting the battery would probably cause an explosion in
| around one minute. That's close enough to simultaneous.
|
| From https://www.mdpi.com/2313-0105/8/11/201
|
| A puncture causes runaway/explosion in seconds.
| Overcharging takes 13 minutes. There's not good data on a
| dead short (because it's unlikely during normal
| operation), but it's going to be between those on the
| faster end. From personal experience a shorts cause
| things to get noticeably hot after about 10 seconds, the
| graphs show that once you hit 60C things rapidly get
| worse.
|
| A relay may have been required to hold the short as the
| battery stops supplying voltage.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Batteries aren't pressure vessels though. Pressure
| vessels are generally decently large; how are you going
| to get one with significant capacity inside something as
| small and lightweight as a pager? Just putting in some
| plain explosives makes a lot more sense.
| Retr0id wrote:
| A battery without pressure relief is definitionally a
| pressure vessel. How much damage it actually does when it
| explodes is another question entirely.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| It's a very minimal amount of pressure it can withstand,
| is the point. Certainly nowhere close to lethal explosive
| pressure. It's not a pressure vessel in the sense of the
| kind of pressure vessel it takes to make an effective
| bomb.
| EMCymatics wrote:
| Possibly hydrogen explosion.
| wizardforhire wrote:
| It's the simultaneous timing thats a giveaway for me.
| Maybe you could have a few batteries explode but 2000 of
| them? It's too clean to be just batteries imo.
| londons_explore wrote:
| These pagers probably had puch cells - those catch fire
| violently, but don't explode because the film can't
| contain much pressure.
| davidw wrote:
| I want to see a video of this compared to explosives.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| This wasn't a battery, it doesn't match the damage seen.
| The evidence has all the hallmarks of a small charge of
| high-explosive.
| varjag wrote:
| One easy way to conceal the explosive would be to
| overmold it in a cavity inside the plastic enclosure.
| This would escape all but the most thorough inspections.
| And since battery terminals are typically also embedded
| in the plastic this can provide a clandestine supply of
| power and signal with something like Dallas protocol to
| the fuse.
| water-data-dude wrote:
| I don't think they're saying you'd need to change the
| chemistry though, they're saying they could have altered
| way it was packaged so that when it started burning there
| was nowhere for the gas to go.
|
| Similar to how firecrackers work. If you take a
| firecracker apart and light the powder, you'll get a
| flash and a lot of smoke, but no bang. The explosion
| comes from the pressure building up in an enclosure.
|
| Disclaimer: not a chemist. Just a former unwisely curious
| kid
| bagels wrote:
| CCTV footage of one of the explosions:
|
| https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/dozens-
| hezbollah-m...
|
| This isn't how lithium batteries fail.
| this_steve_j wrote:
| The explosion in the video does show visible smoke, but
| there is not a visible flame or fire.
| ArnoVW wrote:
| That is what explosives look like. You're thinking 80's
| movies explosions, made with barrels of gas.
|
| Tom Scott explains it better than I do
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OOWcTV2nEkU
| mortenjorck wrote:
| Yeah, this should remove any doubt that there were
| explosives involved. At the 500 to 1000 mA hour capacity
| typically used in pagers, even tampering with the
| battery's venting in an attempt to build up gas pressure
| would at worst result in a pop and some smoke from the
| top of the bag.
|
| Blowing a hole in the side of the bag and sending debris
| for several meters is obviously not plausible with that
| quantity of lithium.
| mdasen wrote:
| It looks like 1-way pagers sold in the US are powered by AA
| or AAA batteries:
| https://pagersdirect.net/collections/1-way-pagers.
|
| That's not to say that they couldn't have put a lithium AA
| or AAA battery into the pagers or inserted a modified
| AA/AAA battery that was a combination of lithium (with
| greater power density) and explosive.
|
| It's also possible that they have fancier 1-way pagers than
| I'm aware of.
| mrtksn wrote:
| According to this post, the pagers that exploded had
| rechargeable batteries. They even used USB-C, so
| Hezbollah must be using somewhat fancy pagers:
| https://x.com/BabakTaghvaee1/status/1836082246538629490
| londons_explore wrote:
| Surprising nobody has yet posted the make/model.
|
| Really shows that the HN community and the victims have
| very little overlap.
| chasil wrote:
| Elsewhere here listed as: Gold Apollo Rugged Pager AR924
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=About+https://www.gapollo
| .co...
| cdchn wrote:
| I remember reading once that Apollo is pretty much the
| only name in the game any more for pagers.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| How do you fit an explosive into a pager and still have the
| pager work? Like, aren't they already optimized to have
| everything for inside super tight?
| tptacek wrote:
| I think it makes more sense to think of these as
| explosive devices manufactured by/for Israel that are
| just designed to pass as pagers.
| bluescrn wrote:
| Pagers, by definition, are likely to be older technology.
|
| The internals could be replaced with modern smaller and
| lower-power equivalents, requiring a smaller battery, and
| saving enough space.
|
| (Or maybe somebody just donated a batch of innocent-
| looking devices to 'the cause', or offered a bargain on
| some 'extra secure' pagers?)
| fencepost wrote:
| Thinner (less durable, but who cares?) plastic shell to
| free up space for explosives, but would likely be obvious
| if someone opened it - which might be a common thing if
| these were being used as remote triggering devices.
|
| If they were using a AA battery, replace the battery with
| something that provides you space to work (e.g. put in a
| AAAA or button cell that would provide appropriate power
| but lower capacity) because you don't really care if the
| battery life drops from months to weeks.
| Mtinie wrote:
| I can easily envision a scenario that would preemptively
| "explain" why the pagers are internally different from
| past models:
|
| Supplier: "Hey, we've got a refreshed model of the pager
| you wanted to buy in bulk. Interested?"
|
| Buyer: "I don't know, how do they work?"
|
| Supplier: "Same as the other ones, minus a bit less
| plastic protection. With the weight savings they've added
| a new hardened receiver that's supposedly more secure and
| will keep communications private. Also, they are 50%
| cheaper per unit..."
|
| Buyer: "Say no more. We'll take them."
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| No, a pager is optimized to be a case size that's
| comfortable for carrying and reading. The electronics
| could be the size of the smallest wristwatch, which is
| already dominated by its own form factor requirements,
| not the PCB + battery + display subcomponents that are
| scarcely the size of a nickel.
|
| A typical pager is about 60 x 40 x 20mm. Much of this
| volume requirement is driven by the 16mm diameter 34mm
| long CR123 battery, a lot of it could be empty.
|
| That battery is a relatively safe lithium primary
| chemistry, not a rechargeable Lithium polymer pounch or
| lithium ion cylinder that would risk fire and explode if
| the overpressure vents were omitted and the BMS
| corrupted, but the primary lasts for years.
|
| I bet you could use a CR1216 battery (1.6mm thin, 30mAh,
| instead if 34mm long and 1500mAh) instead and have quite
| a good deal of spare volume in the battery for an
| explosive. If you filled the entire pager, that would be
| even more room, but much more easily detected.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _I bet you could use a CR1216 battery (1.6mm thin,
| 30mAh, instead if 34mm long and 1500mAh) instead and have
| quite a good deal of spare volume in the battery for an
| explosive._
|
| I'd be fascinated if that was the physical vector...
|
| However, tainting a component pre-integration seems a lot
| more likely than simply packing explosive in the case.
|
| Israel inserts the compromised components upstream in the
| supply chain, they're duly assembled into pagers, which
| then make their way to Hezbollah, where they're
| inspected, look normal, and work normally, and are then
| distributed.
|
| That would still require a firmware hack to presumably
| trigger though (incoming message stack to component
| trigger).
| lxgr wrote:
| > The electronics could be the size of the smallest
| wristwatch
|
| Swatch actually used to sell a wristwatch that includes a
| pager! Battery life was pretty bad though; it came with a
| keychain accessoire to store a spare CR2032 and a battery
| swapping tool.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Those thin coin cells can't output enough currents to
| replace most use cases. I've once tried to run ESP32 with
| couple CR2032, the ESP just browns out.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| According to the manufacturer the pagers have a nominal
| battery life of about three months so it's not likely
| someone would actually notice if this number is cut in
| half or less.
| Mtinie wrote:
| If cost per unit isn't a consideration, I suspect you can
| shrink the size of the electronic components used in the
| pager to make room for a 20 gram explosive charge.
|
| Pagers--especially commodity models--aren't profitable
| enough to warrant cutting edge tech with the latest
| advances in microelectronics. Lots of room to improve
| things if you are making a set of them at a loss.
| phs318u wrote:
| Because it takes a surprisingly small amount of high
| explosive to cause the kind of damage shown in the
| footage we've seen so far. All it would take is for the
| battery to be replaced with a combo package - part
| battery, part explosive. No need for additional internal
| space.
|
| Disclosure: my first job was in the Australian Defence
| Science Technology Organisation, Materials Research Lab,
| Explosives Instrumentation Group.
| Hermandw wrote:
| Amir Tsarfati: The updated numbers:
|
| 4000 wounded of which 400 in critical conditions
|
| Al Jazeera from a Lebanese security source:
|
| The pagers were brought to Lebanon 5 months ago. They were
| boobytrapped in advance. Each device contained an explosive
| weighing no more than 20 grams.
| oldpersonintx wrote:
| whoever is good/evil aside...
|
| hezbollah got totally owned and look like fools...relying
| on tech they just took at face value out of the box
| sushid wrote:
| Why did the Hezbollah even leverage beepers in the first
| place? As in why not just use telegram or signal or some
| other app of choice?
| hattmall wrote:
| So that Israel couldn't track their locations via cell
| networks. Sure you could use Signal or w/e but it's the
| cell IDs and knowing where people are that was the issue.
| The pagers do far less, if any, two way communication so
| it's not likely to give away location data.
| zhengyi13 wrote:
| Pagers don't have GPS devices embedded in them.
|
| Apps (some more or less than others) represent a target
| for a nation state to pursue for information, graph
| analysis, bugging, etc.
| netsharc wrote:
| Even dumb phones can be tracked by antenna triangulation,
| and I wouldn't be surprised if Israeli hackers are inside
| Lebanese phone networks...
| roywiggins wrote:
| Even a dumbphone with the GPS physically removed is going
| to be a lot easier to target than a one-way pager, since
| they are always chatting with the cell towers.
| jameshart wrote:
| Pagers don't have GPS devices embedded in them - that you
| know of.
|
| If you can't control your supply chain then that isn't
| guaranteed.
|
| After all, most pagers don't contain explosive charges
| either.
| ra wrote:
| Because cellphones transmit, pagers don't.
| xupybd wrote:
| Can you make the case out of a solid explosive material?
| ethagnawl wrote:
| I had a rechargeable battery explode in my kitchen recently
| and it was like a small grenade went off. I'll see if I can
| find the photos but it shattered trim and bits went through
| a screen on the other side of the room.
|
| So, an "excited" AA (which, I believe is what pagers
| usually use) could do a surprising amount of damage.
|
| Photo: https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/file
| s/111/40...
| jajko wrote:
| Given history, given adversary, given all facts known thats
| practically sure. Usually Mosad doesn't say anything so we
| won't get much more anytime soon.
|
| There will be few movies and documentaries about this for
| sure once things calm down a bit. I presume they used pagers
| instead of phones to not be so easily trackable via
| google/apple software and hardware?
| minkles wrote:
| A pager is passive receiver only. It never transmits. So
| you can't track it. That allows an operative to get to a
| secure line or obtain a burner device.
|
| Whoever did this just killed that as an information channel
| as both the devices and the network are now compromised.
| the-rc wrote:
| That's not been true for well over twenty years.
|
| http://suntelecom.com/images/st900_large.jpg
| minkles wrote:
| Looks like they were using Gold AL-A25 / Apollo 929
| pagers which are 100% passive.
| Dig1t wrote:
| Funny enough the Apollo pagers website appears to be
| down.
| noduerme wrote:
| What if the company itself was a front? That sounds like
| Mossad's style of planning, much more so than
| intercepting shipments or something.
| vel0city wrote:
| You might as well be arguing all cell phones are iPhones,
| because here's a model which is an iPhone. Sure, some are
| two-way pagers and do transmit, but most aren't.
|
| Loads of pagers are passive, receive-only devices.
| There's a reason why there's a common distinction between
| "pager" and "two-way pager".
| spidersenses wrote:
| >Whoever did this just killed that as an information
| channel as both the devices and the network are now
| compromised.
|
| This is also true for Hezbollah. They must now distrust
| their own network, equipment and procurement channels.
| The reshuffling resulting from the casualties will make
| the organization less effective, at least temporarily,
| thus delaying any attack plans and allowing moles to rise
| through the ranks.
| cdchn wrote:
| >Whoever did this just killed that as an information
| channel as both the devices and the network are now
| compromised.
|
| I'm not sure if thats true, they just need to start
| cracking open their shipments of pagers and looking for
| explosives.
| clydethefrog wrote:
| There are several sources online claiming the model used is
| the Gold Apollo Rugged Pager AR924. This pager is made in
| Taiwan, a country that has close ties with Israel and it's
| most important ally USA. Just a week ago Taiwan's Foreign
| Minister Lin Chia-Lung openly emphasized the critical
| importance of intelligence sharing and technology cooperation
| with Israel.
| billfor wrote:
| That's going to be bad for business....
| axlee wrote:
| All the terrorist market suddenly boycotting them, I'm
| sure they're losing sleep over it.
| highcountess wrote:
| You are not thinking past the first point. Considering
| what these people have been doing lately, even if you are
| currently on their good side, what happens when you're
| not or don't want to serve them anymore? Think places
| like India and Brazil may be rethinking their supply
| chains right now?
| dagaci wrote:
| Any .org should be considering the risk of allowing
| devices unfettered into onto their businesses premesis
| which could be used to trigger remote explosions, allies
| and enemies.
| sbassi wrote:
| Business for pagers is not going great anyway...
| PepperdineG wrote:
| Dennis Duffy finally got a big commercial order and now
| that customer isn't going to use him again. That's no way
| to impress Liz Lemon.
| Animats wrote:
| Site is down: https://www.gapollo.com.tw/rugged-pager-
| ar924/
| fencepost wrote:
| Archived a couple hours ago: https://archive.is/Kw0Pg
|
| 95g, USB-C rechargeable up to 85 days of operation,
| separate control and charging boards, multiple
| replaceable components for easy maintenance.
|
| Probably lots of ways to free up space, most notably by
| using a smaller battery but with a few resources you
| could probably combine the boards and probably not even
| be obvious ("generation 2, less expensive to produce").
| With state-actor level resources new boards would be easy
| as would something concealed within a LiPo battery.
| sitkack wrote:
| Time right for a meshtastic pager with a BOM with no
| bombs.
| dhx wrote:
| It was reported in Turkish news (allegedly via IRGC on X)
| that pagers are all Motorola branded, and supposedly at
| least include the Motorola LX-2 model.[1][2] However, the
| provided image of a Motorola LX-2 is also the first image
| on the Wikipedia English page for pagers.
|
| There is also a photo circulating of a destroyed pager[3]
| which has visible writing "Distri: GOLD" and "Model: AP"
| (or "AR"). This has been matched to the Gold Apollo AR-924
| model pager that is manufactured in Taiwan and is not a
| Motorola pager.[4][5][6][etc][7][8][9]
|
| [1] https://www.turkiyetoday.com/region/this-is-how-israel-
| targe...
|
| [2] https://i.turkiyetoday.com/image/resize/876x1024/wp-
| content/...
|
| [3] https://i.turkiyetoday.com/image/resize/1280x1280/wp-
| content...
|
| [4] https://x.com/JakeGodin/status/1836042111726072229
|
| [5] https://x.com/PaDaGal/status/1836057094211969467
|
| [6] https://x.com/Kahlissee/status/1836102796090953812
|
| [7] https://web.archive.org/web/https://www.gapollo.com.tw/
| rugge...
|
| [8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x50wwGjX2Ao
|
| [9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jzDHm68Wio
| mcast wrote:
| 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.
| moduspol wrote:
| Well cell phones have been used as detonators for quite
| some time, right? It's not too much of a stretch.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Its one thing to figure out how to wire the vibrator in a
| phone into an external explosive activation circuit.
|
| Its a whole other thing to do a supply chain intercept on
| an entire factory run of pagers, build a difficult to
| detect explosive into them, get them into the hands of
| your enemies, and remotely trigger them over
| infrastructure you don't directly control.
|
| This is an incredible level of execution. And,
| presumably, the IDF or some attached intelligence agency
| demonstrating how deeply they own their adversary's
| networks.
| moduspol wrote:
| I'm not sure they necessarily need to deeply own their
| adversary's networks. I'd be impressed if Lebanese pager
| tech has any serious kind of encryption, for example. And
| we're already accepting at face value that they sabotaged
| the devices, so it's possible this was done with a
| separate RF signal than their own cellular network, even
| if it is locked down.
|
| But yes, the supply chain sabotaging is certainly
| impressive.
| svnt wrote:
| You probably need firmware and some major component
| modification, such as a display or battery, but not more
| than this, to pull it off. So at a minimum, two
| components, or perhaps one smart component such as a
| display.
|
| It seems the model was the AP-900, not the AR-924, which
| used alkaline (ie removable) batteries, so a new theory
| is an EFP (explosively formed penetrator) manufactured
| into the device.
|
| It appears the devices do not function on cell phone
| networks but instead on internal radio networks such as
| those used within industrial or medical settings.
|
| Best guess is the displays because:
|
| 1) there is enough room for the EFP,
|
| 2) you could modify the component to trigger itself,
| meaning it doesn't need coordination between any other
| parts of the device
|
| 3) there are a lot of injuries to the face reported --
| with a display you could trip on button push without
| needing access to the button, when people tend to be
| looking right at the EFP
|
| 4) in the videos the explosions look very directional
| torginus wrote:
| TIL: pagers still exist.
|
| I wonder, if these devices could be suspect, why don't they
| order these cheap Chinese GSM modules. You can't hide
| explosives in those.
|
| Also, afaik all GSM modules broadcast their IMEI numbers over
| the network. Explosives or not, I'm sure they can all be
| tracked and triangulated, since they talk to the towers. I
| don't think these things are secure anyways.
| cdchn wrote:
| They might not have been GSM but one way POCSAG pagers.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Pagers are truly receive only. A pager is effectively a
| pocket FM radio fixed to one station, that vibrates when a
| relevant message was digitally read aloud on the radio.
|
| GSM on the other hand is cellular and bidirectional so
| triangulation problem applies.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| If an entire shipment was intercepted and modified, how many
| other pagers are out there? How many non-targeted persons are
| walking around with a bomb in their pocket?
| riffraff wrote:
| There's also plenty of bystanders who are being impacted by
| an explosion happening in the pocket of the person next to
| them.
|
| I don't think whoever approved this was worried about
| innocent people getting hurt.
| tptacek wrote:
| I watched a video of one of these exploding in the pocket
| of someone at a grocery store with someone standing
| directly next to him, so close they were rubbing
| shoulders, and the bystander was fine. No doubt there
| were many dozens of civilian casualties, but if the
| numbers net out the way you'd expect they would (ie:
| people carrying these pagers, which link to Hezbollah's
| own communications network --- they run their own phone
| company --- are overwhelmingly Hezbollah operatives) this
| is going to pencil out as one of the most surgical
| attacks of all time.
|
| Every military strike in modern warfare will involve
| someone in some sense not worrying about innocent people
| getting hurt. This isn't Agincourt. Wars happen in cities
| now.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| There are too many threads and this is too complicated a
| topic for a technology forum website so I'm not going to
| weigh in everywhere.
|
| But you yourself recognize that a) Hezbollah is a de
| facto government, not just a military or terrorist
| organization and that b) its folly to do some sort of
| algebra on casualties in these conflicts and intent is
| what matters.
|
| It's hard to come up with a plausible intent for a strike
| that injured 2700 people, with only the weakest of
| targeting mechanisms across a population that ranges the
| gamut of occupations, other than terrorism.
|
| We would certainly view it as such if Hezbollah blew up
| 2700 phones of the Israeli government and military.
| tptacek wrote:
| That depends on who the 2700 people are, right? If it's
| 2700 random people, I agree. If it's 2600 Hezbollah
| operatives, not so much. If Hezbollah managed to
| surgically strike 2600 IDF soldiers, injuring and killing
| an additional 100 bystanders, I _promise_ you I would
| offer the same analysis.
|
| I'm measuring this against the standard of military
| operations conducted by western countries, the state of
| the art of which is Hellfire missiles fired into cars and
| apartment buildings.
|
| I'm trying to be hedge-y as I write this stuff. We could
| absolutely learn things that would change my take on
| this!
| dralley wrote:
| One of the most specifically targeted, discriminatory
| large-scale attacks of all time, and still people
| complain.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| If they didn't care they would directly level the
| building.
| loceng wrote:
| And yet it took 5 hours for IDF to respond to Hamas breaching
| their border - where it only takes a maximum of 45 minutes
| via helicopter to get to any point along the Israel-Palestine
| border?
|
| Is there any technology possible to help people more
| seriously see incongruences for what they are, technology to
| help prevent people from propaganda - or is that primarily
| simply a systems control issue - education system,
| information system, etc - that would be party to a
| censorship-suppression narrative control and distraction
| apparatus?
| iknowstuff wrote:
| Im assuming you're saying they were looking for a casus
| belli. They well might have, but surely the assailants knew
| this was a likely consequence. Why did they proceed to
| breach the border if they didn't want to trigger a war?
| loceng wrote:
| You do know this so-called war didn't start on Oct. 7th,
| right?
|
| This world needs to be mandated to watch all of the
| actual evidence, and just propaganda by those who mostly
| control the mainstream-social media channels.
| iknowstuff wrote:
| Please elaborate
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| Hamas coordinated strikes against Israeli c4i to hinder the
| IDF response to the invasion. This is trivially verifiable.
| Not all of Hamas are barely-educated fighters capable of
| little more than being pointed at innocents and told to
| kill.
| loceng wrote:
| Most sophisticated-best funded military in the world
| doesn't have automatic alert systems in place,
| redundancies, etc, eh?
|
| You probably also don't believe that the Hannibal
| Directive was deployed on Oct. 7th as well, even though
| Israel is known to have done the same as early as 1986.
|
| P.S. There are IDF intelligence agents who are
| whistleblowers that say that this had to have been
| allowed.
| romseb wrote:
| After seeing some videos of faces and hands that were blown
| off, it's clear that the tiny batteries could not have caused
| explosions like this.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| First thing I thought of were the exploding PCs from Die Hard
| 4. Back then it was such a ridiculous thing, but here we are ;)
| tw04 wrote:
| >I already wonder if this was anything that was planted in the
| devices perviously
|
| That seems to be the case with almost complete certainty. They
| said it was a new batch of pagers that the
| targets/victims/whatever you choose to call them received in
| the last few months.
|
| >The pagers that detonated were the latest model brought in by
| Hezbollah in recent months, three security sources said.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/dozens-hezbollah-m...
| xg15 wrote:
| Haaretz reports that the devices were purchased only recently -
| and heated up before detonating. [1]
|
| So, that sounds like indicators for both, either a supply-chain
| attack or malware targeting the battery.
|
| [1] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-09-17/ty-article-
| li...
| tptacek wrote:
| How much stuff is there to fuck with in a standard,
| untampered-with pager? Seems unlikely this was pure cyber
| (and some novel battery hack). And if you need supply chain
| interception to carry out the attack in the first place, why
| _wouldn 't_ you insert explosives? There's a history of these
| kinds of attacks.
| xg15 wrote:
| Yeah, agreed. Also agreeing with the sibling posters that
| the videos that emerge look nothing like batteries catching
| fire but rather like actual detonations. Nothing an
| untampered pager should be able to do.
| Kapura wrote:
| Stuxnet had a much lower body count.
| bluescrn wrote:
| If the footage on Twitter is legit, then there was a small
| detonation, with a bang, not a burning battery with a 'whoosh'
| and flames. Which indicates that the internals of the pager had
| been replaced with something rather more explosive than a
| lithium battery.
| burke wrote:
| Lithium ion batteries in devices are sandwiched layers
| enclosed in a kind of 'pouch', right? So what if you
| manufactured one of these that looked identical to the normal
| battery, but only had half a battery inside, and the rest of
| it was plastic explosive. Maybe put a tiny chip in there
| that, when a particular pattern of current draw happens,
| fires a detonator. Then, some firmware hack in the device
| proper that responds to some event and actuates that current
| draw pattern. It wouldn't even look suspicious if you opened
| it up.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| That's an interesting idea, and it wouldn't even need a
| firmware hack... a real time clock circuit with a specific
| date/time to detonate would be simpler and easier to
| coordinate simultaneous detonation.
| andrewshadura wrote:
| Pagers typically ran off regular AA batteries, not Li-Ion
| stuff.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| This would also make modifying stock phones, or weaponising
| pre-configured phones, far easier as all that would be
| required would be a battery swap on ~3k devices. Plus
| restoring packaging to its initial conditions (a shrink-
| wrap sealer).
|
| My own speculation is that battery or another easily
| swappable component such as a battery cover would be the
| most likely means to make such a modification. The battery
| itself affords more capabilities. A battery swap in a phone
| already wired or programmed to send a signal to the battery
| pack on receipt of a specific signal, or perhaps on a
| timer, would be the most effective ways I can think of to
| actually trigger such an event.
|
| Of the several videos I've seen, hospital footage showing
| blast injuries to the face in some cases, and the dresser
| footage showing a clean hole which might have been either
| unidirectional (pager atop dresser) or bidirectional (in
| drawer) would suggest a possible shaped charge or dual
| shaped charges to maximise damage with minimum explosive.
|
| This would suggest that Israel may have a stockpile of
| battery-shaped explosives for this, and one might suspect
| _other_ electronic devices, which could be similarly
| deployed.
|
| The signalling that holding a phone to your ear might prove
| less a risk of RF radiation and more of RDX radiation might
| also bear consideration.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Compared to Stuxnet it's also a first where this kind of attack
| was done at scale. Regardless of the particular target it's of
| course the question whether this is a desirable practice in
| cyber warfare. For such a new field there are very few ethical
| guidelines yet, like we do have for more conventional warfare.
| jakeinspace wrote:
| Unlike stuxnet, this attack had a lot of non-hezbolah
| civilian casualties. It's "targeted" in a sense, but not
| really much more targeted than a drive-by assassination
| attempt. Anybody close to these people could have sustained
| serious injury, and there are reports of children injured and
| dead. We'll have to wait for details to emerge.
|
| Politically, this is the sort of action that invites
| comparison to conventional terrorism. It also begs the
| question of why Hezbollah or other actors shouldn't try a
| similar attack against civilian targets. It's almost like a
| chemical or biological attack, which most countries shy away
| from because it's so hard to defend against (a big part of
| why it's illegal). No country can perfectly safeguard its
| supply chain from intentional sabotage.
|
| I'm afraid that the entire world is a little bit less safe
| after this move. Maybe Israel is goading Hezbollah into all-
| out war, who knows, but this affects all of us.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Stuxnet didn't have a lot of civilian casualties (if any?)
| but it did cause a lot of monetary damage to civilian
| companies.
|
| However this was of course unintended, the malware was
| never meant to make it out to the wider world.
| pesfandiar wrote:
| It's implausible that any "civilian" company was
| involved. Pretty much all companies involved in the
| Iranian infrastructure, especially covert nuclear
| projects, are directly or indirectly owned by IRGC.
| frabbit wrote:
| That's a good summary of the dangers of normalizing the
| actions that previously were the domain of only terrorists.
| The world works because most countries and people rejected
| amoral results-based reasoning and considered such actions
| in the light of another dimension: morality. It's difficult
| to define, but there was some sort of consensus. How long
| those agreements, formal and simply normative, will last
| remains to be seen. I do not look forward to their further
| erosion.
| tptacek wrote:
| It does not make a whole lot of sense to distinguish the
| explosives packed into the warhead of an AGM-114 Hellfire
| missile from those of an explosive vest or a compromised
| pager. What distinguishes terrorism from military action
| is target selection, not weapons choice.
| frabbit wrote:
| I cannot see any comment in the immediate sub-thread
| making a distinction between explosives per se?
|
| Certainly to me I don't see the difference between
| explosives supplied in a missile produced with US tax-
| subsidies to arms profiteers or explosives produced by
| someone else. Except that in the first case US voters
| have some control over the supply -- not much, but some.
|
| The GP comment is clearly talking about the lack of
| precision or targeting. Here you may have a point if we
| consider absolute quantities instead of some relative
| measurement: a US-taxpayer-supplied-with-profits-to-a-
| private-company Hellfire missile fired into a refugee
| camp full of women and children might kill 10 obviously-
| innocent people for 1 presumed-to-be-a-terrorist-without-
| any-sort-of-trial person; whereas a pager bomb exploding
| might blow up the we-dont-know-yet-anything-but-he-was-
| in-Hezbollah and his ten-year old daughter.
|
| If I were a moral simpleton I might argue that the
| Hellfire missile murders were worse than the pager
| murders.
|
| But what do I know? After all hundreds of years of
| protocols and treaties and norms about this sort of thing
| are probably just old and in need of being re-envisioned
| by some clever code jockey.
| tptacek wrote:
| Do you honestly believe that "protocols and treaties"
| established "hundreds of years" ago have any bearing on
| modern conflict? Do you have any arguments that would be
| persuasive to those of us who believe them to be more or
| less irrelevant since the Franco-Prussian War? I'm an
| American. We firebombed Dresden and Tokyo, then got up
| the next day and made breakfast. Pick another major
| combatant nationality anywhere on the globe, and I'll
| tell you a similar story.
|
| By the standards of modern warfare, what happened today
| was probably weirdly _humane_.
| beaglesss wrote:
| I wonder what modern humane outcome plays out to a tiny
| nation state surrounded by arabs they're engaged in these
| kind of hostilities with. It seems this balance depends
| on large imbalanced external support, which will be
| called into question more and more as the USA loses
| global grip.
| mongol wrote:
| The peace of Westfalia established state sovereignity.
| That is a cornerstone of international relations, and
| when it is breached it is usually condemned.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _peace of Westfalia established state sovereignity.
| That is a cornerstone of international relations_
|
| The Westphalian treaties gave France, Sweden and later
| Russia the explicit right to intercede ( _i.e._ invade)
| to guarantee the Imperial constitution [1]. (Westphalia
| was concerned with the Holy Roman Empire.)
|
| Westphalian sovereignty is a myth [2].
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guarantor_of_the_impe
| rial_co...
|
| [2]
| https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-
| organi...
| juliusdavies wrote:
| It was astonishingly humane especially considering how
| effective it was:
|
| 1.) Communication network completely destroyed (anyone
| with a working pager in Lebanon has thrown it in the
| garbage).
|
| 2.) Most targets, while severely injured and even
| blinded, are still alive - I'm sure their families prefer
| this to them being dead.
|
| 3.) If you are an enemy of Israel, what can you even do
| now? You cannot assume your phones or your furniture or
| even your cat is safe. Any one of these things could
| detonate and kill or maim you at any time. And you can't
| trust anyone in your organization either.
|
| I think this attack coupled with the https://en.wikipedia
| .org/wiki/Assassination_of_Ismail_Haniye... Haniyeh
| assassination (in the presumably safest of safe places
| for him) has re-established Israel and Mossad as
| absolutely and utterly dominant.
|
| I deplore zionism, but that doesn't change how humane and
| effective and incredibly precise this attack was.
| Probably its humane-ness was not particularly on purpose,
| and was more a side-effect of the constraints they were
| working with (hiding explosives in a small pager while
| still maintaining its correct operation), but that
| doesn't take away from how much better this is for all
| the casualties compared to, for example, Hamas casualties
| in Gaza.
| nradov wrote:
| Historically there has never been any such moral
| consensus in the Middle East. It's been a continuous
| series of wars, massacres, and terrorism going back
| millennia -- since long before Hezbollah or the modern
| state of Israel even existed.
| ars wrote:
| I've seen multiple videos of the explosions, even people
| standing directly next to the target were not hurt.
|
| Contrary to what you said, this is pretty much the ultimate
| in targeted attacks.
| tptacek wrote:
| For a non-infantry massed attack on a military asset, the
| ratio of military to civilian casualties here is probably
| going to end up being unprecedented in the history of
| modern warfare; this will probably end up being an
| extraordinarily surgical attack by any military standard.
| Civilians are routinely killed in targeted strikes, because
| targeted strikes are almost always conducted by air. This
| attack may end up being distinguished by how _few_
| civilians were harmed.
|
| Neither Israel nor Hezbollah is mobilized for all-out war
| here. Hezbollah is depleted from its disastrous efforts in
| Syria; Israel is fully committed to combat operations in
| Gaza. The north of Israel has been evacuated for months
| because of indiscriminate rocket attacks from Hezbollah.
| Hezbollah is an arm of the IRGC, which is more or less at
| open war with Israel. If either side could have launched an
| all-out assault (or, I mean, a more conventional all-out
| assault than this one), they would have done so already.
| dotancohen wrote:
| > Hezbollah is depleted from its disastrous efforts in
| Syria
|
| From what I understand this is inaccurate. Prior to the
| events of today, Hezbollah moral is very high and they
| have plenty of armaments from Iran - everything from
| small arms and uniforms to long-range rockets and drones.
| In fact, they even produce a very nice local drone made
| from foam and duct tape - literally.
| tptacek wrote:
| They lost double digit percentages of their fighting
| forces, with several thousand additional casualties in
| non-Hezbollah Lebanese military and paramilitary forces.
| I'm sure they can duct tape drones together or whatnot,
| but there are reasons Hezbollah has --- quite notably at
| this point! lots of stories written! --- not escalated in
| the south even as the conflict between Iran and Israel
| heats up.
| rurp wrote:
| > Hezbollah is depleted from its disastrous efforts in
| Syria;
|
| There is an awful lot of reporting stating the opposite
| of this, and I haven't really seen anything credible
| questioning the fact that Hezbollah has many thousands of
| missiles and rockets at the ready, along with a sizable
| number of competent fighters. In fact, the threat from
| Hezbollah is widely considered one of the largest
| deterrents Iran has against a direct attack from Israel.
|
| Despite their potential to harm Israel, the group would
| almost certainly lose an all out war against the IDF.
| Many if not most of the members would be killed in such a
| conflict and Lebanon would be plunged into a war zone. So
| it's easy to see why Hezbollah would be hesitant to get
| into a full scale war, despite their combat potential.
|
| Since 10/7 a number of top Israeli officials have
| advocated for a preemptive assault on Hezbollah. So far
| they have lost the argument but it still could
| conceivably happen at any time. Eliminating the looming
| threat and allowing civilians to return to the north are
| compelling reasons, but the risk of heavy losses and
| getting bogged down into another quagmire in Lebanon are
| serious concerns.
| tptacek wrote:
| The last time Israel and Hezbollah fought, it was a
| stalemate.
| grotorea wrote:
| I feel this is just one more step away from "wild"
| globalized products and towards supply chain safety.
| dotancohen wrote:
| > Unlike stuxnet, this attack had a lot of non-hezbolah
| civilian casualties. It's "targeted" in a sense, but not
| really much more targeted than a drive-by assassination
| attempt.
|
| You should know that Hezbollah recently shot a rocket at an
| Israeli playground, 12 or 13 children were killed. The
| chance of a few civilians being injured is calculated
| against preventing the enemy from dropping another rocket
| on another playground.
|
| I read the news in Arabic, there are credible reports of an
| 8 year old girl being killed in this attack. I haven't seen
| that yet in English language news. That is a horrible price
| to pay. But it is part of a calculated risk that, as per
| those same news sources, killed between 10 to 12 Hezbollah
| operatives and injured 2700 more.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| You are assuming they didn't try, which is incorrect. Cyber
| attacks on water filtration plants attacks were done for
| example.
| edm0nd wrote:
| These pagers were 100% a supply chain attack. Intercepted and
| modified with small explosives embedded in them or swapped the
| entire shipment out with ones with a small explosives in them.
|
| There is no possibility these explosions are from battery
| overloads via an exploit or firmware hack.
| sroussey wrote:
| Likely, there are many many more of them out there, just did
| not fall into the dragnet of phone numbers that were set to
| activate.
| meaydinli wrote:
| I'd guess anybody with a pager in that part of the world
| dumped theirs as soon as they heard what happened.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| How do you judge that likely? It seems just as possible if
| not more that it was a single lot purchased by Hezbollah
| for Hezbollah.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I bet lots of people with that model of pager are now
| ripping them open to check for explosives. If we don't see
| pictures of unexploded ones, then I'd guess they were all
| triggered, and the only ones we might see are devices that
| were turned off at the time.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > These pagers were 100% a supply chain attack.
|
| What did you base that on though, 100% is pretty confident
| rdtsc wrote:
| Batteries are not magic unknown technology. People who
| understand their chemistry can confidently say things like
| that.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Dunning-Kruger effect comes to mind again.
| rdtsc wrote:
| How do you mean? I am trying to understand what you're
| saying, it seems you mean that people on HN only _think_
| they understand how battery technology works saying this
| is impossible, but in reality they have no idea, and it's
| trivial to make an explosive device like out of pager
| batteries?
| edm0nd wrote:
| Simple logic and science. Batteries do not cause forceful
| explosions like we've seen today. These pagers were
| intercepted and implanted with explosives (or entire load
| swapped with pre-made malicious ones) and then allowed to
| continue on to their destination. Thus I can say with 100%
| confidence that this was a supply chain attack.
| efitz wrote:
| Reuters is quoting experts, including lithium battery
| experts, saying that the explosions were inconsistent with
| an exploding battery:
|
| https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/what-we-know-so-
| fa...
| spidersenses wrote:
| >or firmware hack.
|
| There's still the question of how the explosive capsule would
| have been triggered. It couldn't just explode at the first
| incoming call. There must be more to that.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| The microcontrollers inside the pagers probably have a
| spare GPIO pin, so they'd just have to modify the software
| and attach the detonating electronics to that gpio pin.
|
| Since i'm supposedly "posting too fast", to answer the post
| below:
|
| > Just curious, is it possible to program the pins so that
| it triggers by wireless or satellite command? With that
| scale I don't think wireless is possible though.
|
| Technically it is, but requires additional electronics and
| antennas. It's much easier to just use the existing pager
| network and trigger when some specific message (or pager
| code) is detected. Paging networks are simple to implement.
| tptacek wrote:
| It seems pretty plausible that the actual supply chain
| attack here would have been Israel subbing out whole
| shipping crates of pagers for sabotaged devices Israel
| manufactured itself, which would allow for arbitrary
| complex designs.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Maybe they bought a large quantity of pagers from the
| same supplier and modified beforehand? I think a few
| grams of high explosives is good enough.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Just curious, is it possible to program the pins so that
| it triggers by wireless or satellite command? With that
| scale I don't think wireless is possible though.
| londons_explore wrote:
| the pager is already wireless. So adding functionality to
| trigger wirelessly (over the phone network) is trivial.
| And it can trigger only with a special message.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Yeah you are probably right. I'm an electronics newbie
| and don't know exactly how pagers work in wireless. I'm
| going to read some material on it.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Thanks, I wonder how does one do that. I'll probably need
| to read how pagers work.
| emiliobumachar wrote:
| Might be a hardcoded date and time. Does the legit pager
| messaging network give the time? If not, continually
| powered digital clocks drift slowly.
| svnt wrote:
| My best guess is explosively formed penetrator in the
| display.
|
| I don't think wholesale replacement of the pagers was
| likely to work for a number of reasons.
|
| They had to go one step up the supply chain.
|
| The EFP display could be set to trigger on a certain
| message, or even the clearing of a certain message, which
| in devices without said display would do nothing.
|
| The display is most likely to be pointed at the user's
| face, or opposed to their waistline (EFPs sort of fire both
| ways but in one axis.
|
| The battery, if it were a cylinder as would be likely,
| would fire tangentially, likely not hitting much.
|
| A prismatic battery would make a good place for an EFP but
| difficult to interface with and likely requires a second
| compromised component.
| hinkley wrote:
| Theory: A prismatic battery with an explosive core and an
| electronic fuse swapped to trigger the explosive instead
| of disconnect the battery. Firmware change to short the
| battery. No visible signs of tampering even in iFixit
| like conditions.
| svnt wrote:
| The best evidence we have now suggests that the devices
| used had removable (AAA) batteries, not built-in
| batteries.
|
| If I was buying pagers and had previously been hit by
| intelligence ops I would be buying batteries in random
| supermarkets.
| rolux wrote:
| What would happen if you walked through airport security
| with such a device?
| doubleorseven wrote:
| > If we try to do what we are best at here at HN, let's focus
| the discussion on the technical aspects of it.
|
| Technical? Yes it's interesting but you are missing the biggest
| part here: how do you convince such a huge organization to
| switch so many devices? This human engineering is the really
| interesting part here.
| BillSaysThis wrote:
| Hezbollah has said some time ago they were switching to
| pagers because Israel can get inside their cell phones.
| cachvico wrote:
| With a statement like that one wonders if Hezbollah
| leadership itself has been infiltrated.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| Israel has an intelligence agency that's generally
| recognized to be quite competent. I'm sure it would have
| taken them approximately 5 minutes to learn from their
| many spies that a new form of communications is being
| used.
| tptacek wrote:
| The IRGC itself has clearly and spectacularly
| infiltrated; read the details of the Haniyeh attack. So,
| yeah, at this point I don't think anyone in the IRGC
| network can trust anybody else. The messaging here is
| pretty intense.
| axlee wrote:
| I mean Israel is behind Pegasus, so it's not exactly a
| secret that they can get into any cellphone. Israel
| didn't need to infiltrate Hezbollah, they just needed
| publicity.
| londons_explore wrote:
| You can also find out what your target is using, find
| some exploits in it and publicize them, then offer a
| super good deal on an upgraded model.
| grotorea wrote:
| Theoretically, pagers are simpler devices, meaning it
| would be much easier in principle to analyse both
| hardware and software to check for issues, unlike a
| mainstream phone OS which has a bigger software attack
| area and can have at least some zero day attacks known to
| a state level actor like Israel.
|
| Although, if it really was explosive inside the pagers it
| seems Hezbollah didn't do this.
| jameshart wrote:
| If you've figured out how to get explosives into pagers,
| the next question is how do you get your enemy to buy a
| bunch of new pagers from you.
|
| They have to want new pagers in a hurry.
|
| So you just need to convince them that their phones are all
| already compromised.
|
| Note that this does not require that _their phones actually
| be compromised_.
| doubleorseven wrote:
| Exactly. But this buyer is not a regular buyer, he is not
| getting a tracking number and refreshing some random
| website to see where it's shipment is. The buyer must
| have been with the goods from a point before it reached
| its destinated country. There are so many plays that had
| to play here in order to orcestrate this. Should make a
| really good heist movie, just with a different prize at
| the end.
| detourdog wrote:
| You find where the pagers are coming from. They probably
| had a supply chain going to cycle through pagers. 2,700
| pagers being replaced regularly is an easy target.
| more_corn wrote:
| I find it extremely unlikely that this was done with the native
| capabilities and equipment in the devices. It would be
| extremely interesting if it were. A far simpler explanation
| would be explosives implanted en-route.
| fhub wrote:
| Shaped charge hidden in the battery casing. Sounds like
| batteries heated up which is consistent with one method that
| shaped charges could be detonated. No extra wires needed going
| into the battery (better concealment).
| rendang wrote:
| Wouldn't a shaped charge be pointed in a specific direction,
| and hence could miss depending on the device's position in
| target's pocket?
| Sakos wrote:
| You might prefer a shaped charge to reduce the likelihood
| of injuring bystanders and to ensure that what little
| explosive you can fit in there can kill whoever is using
| it.
| fhub wrote:
| Watching the grocery store security video, I think a multi-
| directional shaped charge is plausible with pressure
| evident in two directions. But very hard to draw any
| conclusions.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| This is unlikely to be a shaped charge, there is not enough
| space. High explosives are inherently directional depending
| on the geometry of the explosive and point of detonation.
| As a practical matter of fitting explosives into a pager, I
| would expect most of the explosion to be directed
| perpendicular to the face of the pager in both directions.
| In almost all cases, carrying or using the pager would put
| the person directly on the main axis.
| meepmorp wrote:
| Yeah, everyone talking about shaped charges or (micro-)
| explosively formed penetrators seems to overlook the fact
| that, compared to just a regular bomb, they'd be less
| strictly effective for situations where you can't control
| the alignment of the charge to the target.
|
| Don't overthink it - just a bit of RDX and a detonator does
| wonders.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Most high explosives need a high impact detonation source.
| You can literally set C4 on fire and it wont explode. It
| needs high temperature _and_ pressure. And I do not think the
| 120F that a "hot" battery could get to reliably could
| trigger a high explosive in a way that wouldn't accidentally
| trigger beforehand. The middle east is a warm place.
| pts_ wrote:
| It's supply chain attack meets the physical world, and now
| might be replicated.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| I wonder what Israel did to ensure that only legitimate targets
| were harmed by the sabotaged pagers.
| rdtsc wrote:
| Would we be surprised if the answer is "nothing".
|
| Of course we can read anything we want from the silence, as
| it's unlike we're getting any details about it. Anything in
| the range of "of course they did, we're talking about a
| civilized country" to "of course they didn't, how could
| they".
| ars wrote:
| These pagers were distributed only to Hezbollah members,
| these were not just standard pagers anyone could buy.
| sureglymop wrote:
| Even though I personally doubt this statement, care to
| explain how that would possibly be enough? If an explosion
| happens, everyone in range is hit.
| yoavm wrote:
| With the size of these explosions, the "range" seems very
| small.
| ars wrote:
| > everyone in range is hit.
|
| The range is tiny. Go watch some videos, for example this
| one: https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1836037485492629605
|
| People standing _directly_ next to the target are
| unharmed.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| "Enough" to meet what criteria? A couple foot blast on
| handheld device on a military personnel is brain surgery
| in comparison to typical rockets with accuracy and blast
| radii measured in double digit meters
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| Small charges (measured in grams) are extremely local and
| typically highly directional. They have a distinctive
| signature that is in evidence here. It isn't like a giant
| bomb going off.
| tptacek wrote:
| Hezbollah operates a parallel telecommunications network.
| They are not a terrorist group so much as the de facto
| government of Lebanon and a parallel armed forces. It is
| unlikely that anyone unaffiliated with Hezbollah could
| have used these pagers.
| jknoepfler wrote:
| like I don't know, someone's spouse or child? Someone
| standing next to the thing when it's sitting on a night
| stand?
| seo-speedwagon wrote:
| Hezbollah also has a massive social services wing,
| operating hospitals, schools, etc. I'd keep that in mind
| when hitching my wagon to this line of thinking.
| ars wrote:
| Those people aren't getting a secure one-way pager giving
| them secret messages.
|
| They use a standard phone.
| seo-speedwagon wrote:
| Nothing in the linked article backs up the implication
| that only members of Helbollah's militant wing had these.
|
| It did, however, mention that an 8 year old girl was
| killed by one of them. Which is a foreseeable consequence
| of widely distributing a bunch of bombs and then
| detonating them without regard for who's nearby.
| rougka wrote:
| According to Hezbollah sources talking with Reuters
| (https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/pagers-drones-
| how-...) pagers are used to evade Israeli surveillance on
| the battlefield, seems to be highly associated with the
| military wing
| wut42 wrote:
| Some sources are saying that some medics have been
| victims. Pagers are apparently a very useful resource for
| emergencies/medics (see motorola website).
|
| The pagers were not secure at all also.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Do you have a reference for that? And does it explain how
| Israel's assassins were sure none of the pagers weren't
| resold, nor given away, nor that someone's kid was playing
| with it?
| jknoepfler wrote:
| you realize they exploded, right? potentially as someone's
| child was nearby. or playing with it. or in the middle of a
| grocery story.
| yoavm wrote:
| The fact that these pagers were to be used by Hezbollah is
| what they did.
| megous wrote:
| If it's basically a remotely controlled IED via a public
| communication network, then there's nothing technically
| interesting about that, really.
|
| But the aspect of some supposedly civilized state staging a
| mass terror attack via a remotely controlled IEDs, putting
| suddenly thousands of people, many of them civilians (yes,
| Hezballah are also civilians, because they're a major political
| party in Lebanon) into hospital, killing ~10, critically
| infuring ~200, is way more interesting.
|
| You can generate many questions about that aspect. Like the
| whole why on both strategic and tactical levels? How does this
| fit with the international law? Why are people kinda chill
| about this?
|
| Re the response below: No proof of specific targeting of
| combatants, yet. No proof of any attempt to not affect
| bystanders, etc. Yet, there are videos of bombs exploding while
| people are shopping with children around, etc. Pretty much
| indiscriminate.
|
| Definitely not battery burnings: https://t.me/hamza20300/293409
| these are the scale/type of injuries that this caused. (Two
| children there just in this single scene in one hospital, so
| beware.)
| baltimore wrote:
| No, a mass terror attack would _indiscriminately_ target
| victims. This is almost entirely opposite -- an organization
| widely recognized as a terrorist group (1) is _narrowly_
| targeted.
|
| (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_designated_terroris
| t_g...
| ithkuil wrote:
| Also because one would have to weigh the alternative.
|
| Imagine Israel declared an old fashioned war against
| Lebanon as response to the missile strikes originated from
| its territory.
|
| I think the number of civilian casualties of a conventional
| "legal" war would be much much higher than the collateral
| damage of this operation.
|
| Now, does that make it "right"? To me war is horror and is
| to avoid at all cost. Is a smaller horror a cost one's
| willing to pay to avoid a bigger horror? Hard to say. But I
| think it's still important to at least try to see things in
| a broader context otherwise we may never understand why
| people on the ground make the choices they do.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| >Hezballah are also civilians, because they're a major
| political party in Lebanon
|
| That's an interesting take. Are you saying hamas are also
| civilians because they're the major political party in gaza?
| fwip wrote:
| Many of them, yes.
| solarpunk wrote:
| hamas is the governing body of gaza, so any government
| workers would technically be hamas.
|
| don't confuse post office workers for military personnel
| just cuz they work for the government.
| dralley wrote:
| In this case let's just say that I doubt post office
| workers are first in line to get brand new, secure, one-
| way pagers from Hezbollah.
| ChocolateGod wrote:
| I would argue that Hamas has gone from being an organised
| terrorist group to being an idea.
|
| Gaza has a very young population growing up with the
| current war, some (not all) will be radicalized by what
| they experienced growing up.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| My hunch is that IL intelligence bought some 3,000 - 4,000
| pagers of the same models, fixed them with explosives and
| trigger systems, and swapped them with the package sent to Hez
| in the middle of transport or (probably) in the Lebanon
| distribution center.
|
| So they needed to know: which company manufactured those
| pagers; which models are sent to Hez; when they were in
| transport and arrived at the distribution center; which
| packages went to Hez operatives, and much more information.
|
| BTW rumors says the pagers were manufactured by a Taiwanese
| company, not confirmed though but some of my friends were able
| to read from the pictures that show what was left of the
| pagers.
| uoaei wrote:
| There is no way an unaltered pager has enough potential to
| explode in any way that could be harmful using a software-based
| exploit. Unless somehow the BMS (even if there was one) allowed
| you to short the battery with software, which seems really
| stupid to design into such a system.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I suspect supply-chain attack (probably started some time ago),
| combined with a pager signal software hack.
|
| I _really hope_ that they didn 't figure out a way to make
| unmodified kit explode, because it would only be a matter of
| time, before our devices were blowing up everywhere, as folks
| do it for the lulz.
| FrameworkFred wrote:
| I agree on both points and it's worth noting the cell phone
| in everyone's pocket has a lot more battery in it than a
| pager does.
|
| IF this was truly done to unmodified pagers, then we ALL
| probably need to reconsider how we use and carry our phones
| and what the mAh rating on our batteries implies in the
| context of a similar attack.
| tamimio wrote:
| > they didn't figure out a way to make unmodified kit explode
|
| I don't think so no, just observing the aftermath of each
| shows that it was modified. Also, assuming it was unmodified
| way, it will go both ways so I doubt it.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Militaries around the world have robust networks to infiltrate
| supply chains for sabotage. It's kind of a basic part of the
| whole intelligence covert and clandestine operations
| capabilities expected of a "first world" nation.
|
| Israel is one of the better countries at doing this undetected
| so, no surprises here.
| burningChrome wrote:
| I read this and had a good giggle.
|
| Most people are familiar with MG an infosec hardware
| researcher. He's well known in hacker circles for creating the
| OMG cable. However, before he created that cable, he had
| figured out a way to make a usb flash drive that will explode
| once its payload has been delivered.
|
| It was featured on Hackaday back in 2018 - complete with
| videos:
|
| https://hackaday.com/2018/01/19/this-usb-drive-will-self-des...
|
| It was interesting to see the attack on the pagers and how
| successful it was. The pagers offered a much larger device to
| work with and as such, more real estate to attach a far more
| dangerous payload as we saw in this attack.
| humansareok1 wrote:
| Having seen some of the aftermath I find it extremely hard to
| believe this was the result of overloading batteries. It looks
| like small grenades exploded in their hands. If lithium
| batteries can indeed explode like this I would suspect no one
| would ever carry one again after this. They should certainly be
| illegal to have on planes for example.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| My other thought is that these probably came from the Iranian
| military, and it's quite possible the Iranian military puts
| explosives in them so they can remotely detonate one that falls
| into enemy hands. And that Isreal simply found out about this
| and managed to figure out how to activate that.
| gslepak wrote:
| > let's focus the discussion on the technical aspects of it.
|
| The headline chosen here is already biased: "Dozens of
| __Hezbollah members__ [..] "
|
| Anyone following this closely can see that plenty other title
| choices could be used. There are headlines that would be
| credibly neutral, headlines that favor the IDF, and headlines
| that favor Hezbollah. HN is currently choosing to go with a
| non-neutral, non-technical headline for this story. Maybe we
| should make the headline neutral as well before telling the
| commenters to focus solely on the technicals?
|
| If you don't understand what I'm referring to, look at some of
| the downvoted and hidden comments here.
| TwentyPosts wrote:
| Honestly struggling to comprehend how this one isn't neutral.
|
| As far as we know this was a supply-chain attack specifically
| on military pagers actively used by Hezbollah, and (right
| now) it looks like most injured are in fact Hezbollah members
| (which makes sense, since no one else has any reason to carry
| such a pager). (With some sad and unfortunate exceptions.)
| pragma_x wrote:
| > make the device exagerte some existing functionality to a
| point where it caused a malfunction? Thoughts on this?
|
| I'm actually astounded by the things that must have been in
| place to make this attack even plausible, let alone viable. At
| the same time, the ramifications are sobering. Here's where my
| head is:
|
| - Hezbollah failed to inspect electronics that, if tampered
| with, could have lead to some kind of intel breach. That or the
| explosive modifications were indistinguishable from the real
| thing.
|
| - Operatives knew what pager numbers were in use by Hezbollah,
| perhaps exclusively to the rest of the population.
|
| From there I have three possible explanations for how this may
| have been executed:
|
| 1. Many shipments of such pagers bound for Hezbollah in Lebanon
| and other places in the region, were identified, intercepted,
| modified, and sent on their way with minimal delay. You
| probably don't get many opportunities like this (how often do
| you replace a pager?), so this is really quite a hat-trick.
|
| 2. Or: there are many more pagers out there with a very
| dangerous vulnerability on board, with only a special pager
| sequence that stands between the user and sudden death. This
| suggests simply infiltrating the manufacturer instead. This
| also has much more favorable lead times and can leverage the
| manufacturer's resources to that end.
|
| 3. Or: There's a pager manufacturer out there with gob-
| smackingly bad engineering and software on completely stock
| units, which operatives simply exploited to (sub)lethal effect.
| wut42 wrote:
| > what pager numbers
|
| This is where it gets confusing. We all remember the pagers
| running on cellular/2G networks but it seems that nowadays
| most pagers are HF devices and mostly broadcast receivers.
| Quite unclear which one are involved.
| pragma_x wrote:
| Good point. I'm kind of a dumb-dumb when it comes to
| present-day pager tech. I haven't even seen one in decades.
|
| Let me rephrase the question then: if any measure was made
| to target just the pagers that were in the hands of
| Hezbollah, how was that accomplished?
| wut42 wrote:
| So far all I've seen is speculation that a specific
| shipment was targeted.
|
| I'm pretty sure they weren't cellular pagers as they
| don't seem to be the norm nowadays.
| andrewshadura wrote:
| > We all remember the pagers running on cellular/2G
| networks
|
| Who does? I'm not aware of pagers running on the GSM
| network. Maybe they existed, but I don't think they were
| ever widespread.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| I don't think there's anything in a standard pager to cause an
| explosion large enough to injure ~3000 people. This is almost
| certainly an explosive added to them at some point.
| anewguy9000 wrote:
| we could also talk about the technical aspects of the nazi gas
| chambers, but maybe its only human if first we condemn this for
| what it is, a war crime. i for one am sick of the normalization
| of it
| grahamj wrote:
| Crazy. I wonder if they were used for tracking until they were
| found out, at which point BOOM
| throwaway55479 wrote:
| At least Eight killed and 2,750 wounded (200 of those in a
| critical condition) [1]
|
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/sep/17/middle-
| ea...
| listless wrote:
| Good lord that's a lot of damage from exploding pagers. This is
| kind of next level stuff here - straight out of a movie.
| tke248 wrote:
| 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.
| rdl wrote:
| Seems more likely their explosive implant used a separate RF
| trigger -- makes the whole thing much simpler for them, less
| detectable. They could run a plane or drone overhead to send
| the radio initiate message.
|
| Looked like 5-10g (maybe up to 20g?) of explosive, NOT battery.
| I think you could fit the whole package inside an AA battery,
| along with an AAAA battery, so you could do something crazy
| there, or just replace a rechargeable battery pack with
| something of smaller battery capacity containing the explosive,
| some electronics, etc. Or just use spare volume inside the case
| and hope no one does gross physical inspection.
| 01100011 wrote:
| It's trivial to sniff a data line to the LCD and look for a
| specific message(I regrettably had to do this in the late
| 90's to fix a bug using an additional Z8 microcontroller).
| That said, it would be more work than inserting a separate
| module with its own message reception logic.
| tptacek wrote:
| 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).
| MrLeap wrote:
| Many doctors all over the world still use pagers.
| tptacek wrote:
| You think Iran ships 2000 pagers to doctors in Lebanon all
| at once?
| MrLeap wrote:
| I only provided a reasonable caveat to your suggestion
| that anyone in Lebanon with a pager can be assumed
| "guilty".
| tptacek wrote:
| I used the word "guilty" (in quotes) because the parent
| comment did.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| Though not ones supplied by a terror group, connected to
| their private network.
|
| (This is an assumption, I'm neither a doctor nor a
| terrorist).
| einszwei wrote:
| 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 beyond.
|
| In the short term, it's a smart strategy for Israel, but they've
| likely opened Pandora's box in the process.
| flyinglizard wrote:
| It's said those devices were Iranian made. What makes you think
| Israel has any overt involvement in the supply chain to begin
| with?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > It's said those devices were Iranian made.
|
| Made, or provided by?
| tptacek wrote:
| Probably because of Israel's demonstrated infiltration of
| IRGC operations inside of Iran? Just a guess.
| loeg wrote:
| Overt?
| tptacek wrote:
| Since Haniyeh, yes.
| minkles wrote:
| This is a one shot attack. They will never be able to do it
| again. And I don't think most of the world has pissed off
| Mossad quite as much as Hezbollah. Assuming they even did it!
| brookst wrote:
| As someone else posted, it's not entirely novel:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash#Assassination
| ds wrote:
| > "One shot attack"
|
| >> This is the second time israel has done this
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash
| donohoe wrote:
| That is not a supply-chain based attack, so don't think
| that counts in this context
| sangnoir wrote:
| OP was most likely concerned about Israeli businesses that
| supply (or ship) non-explosive components/products no longer
| being trusted.
| rlpb wrote:
| > They will never be able to do it again.
|
| Only if Hezbollah take steps to avoid it. Presumably they
| will, but presumably there is a cost, and so Israel will
| continue to benefit from them having to divert resources to
| doing that.
| lawlessone wrote:
| Yeah every company that has a part of their supply chain via
| Israel must be wondering now if this could be done to their
| devices.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Isn't that true of any supply chain that involves foreign
| states? Usually it's just surveillance, not destructive
| stuff, but expecting state actors to stay out of things is...
| naive?
| ineedasername wrote:
| The difference is between theoretical capability & Israel's
| demonstrated willingness & successful execution of it.
|
| It's pretty reasonable now to think a little harder about
| "huh, I wonder if our Israeli supplier..." but yesterday it
| would have been a bit paranoid, not naive, to spend more
| than a passing moment on the thought if you weren't in a
| member of the March 8th club, or Iran.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| It's naive to think that every country that supplies you
| with goods and you are at war with would go down a route
| like this. Is there really a single country you'd expect
| not to sabotage goods you buy from them if you
| continuously rain rockets onto their population?
| ineedasername wrote:
| I think the point is that, whatever probability a
| potential target would have placed on this sort of thing
| yesterday, those calculations have shifted now.
| Previously it was more abstract and something of this
| scale and physical attack would have been little more
| than a thought experiment. If a news pundit on Fox or CNN
| last night had been claiming China was doing this with
| Huawei phones then many people would have looked at it as
| fear mongering while of course knowing China has in all
| likelihood setup other supply chain attacks. Today it
| would sound a lot more likely.
| alistairSH wrote:
| China already infiltrated our supply chain at least once
| [1]. And then there was Stuxnet. Doesn't seem like a leap
| that the Israelis can do the same and worse with their
| actual (as in shooting engagements) enemies.
|
| 1 -
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-
| big-h...
| tptacek wrote:
| Israel isn't part of the supply chain for Hezbollah pagers.
| rabidonrails wrote:
| ...but this does sound like it would make a hilarious
| Family Guy episode.
| pkphilip wrote:
| Do you really think this supply chain bringing pagers to the
| Hezbollah actually went through Israel?! Israel has ways of
| intercepting packages in other ports outside of Israel.
| some_random wrote:
| I'm not at all convinced that's the case, unless it comes out
| that the targeting was extremely broad (like if Israel was just
| putting bombs in every pager going into Lebanon rather than
| targeting a specific shipment going to Hezbollah) I don't think
| there's really any new risk for other countries.
| tomp wrote:
| Do you think Hezbollah was buying stuff from Israel, or
| otherwise using Israeli supply chains?
|
| I think it's _far_ more likely that Mossad has infiltrated
| whatever foreign (non-Israeli) supply chain they were using.
|
| So this can happen _regardless_ of whether you 're using
| Israeli supply chains or not.
| tivert wrote:
| > I think it's far more likely that Mossad has infiltrated
| whatever foreign (non-Israeli) supply chain they were using.
|
| Yeah. Wasn't there something in the Snowden leaks about the
| CIA intercepting servers in-transit to install implants on
| them? I'm sure Israel is doing something similar.
| willvarfar wrote:
| During the cold war, Russia intercepted typewriters and
| teleprinters going to the US and other embassies and
| inserted implants in them.
| https://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/selectric/
| dredmorbius wrote:
| And the US CIA ran the "Swiss" firm Crypto AG, which sold
| cable-encryption (as in telegraphic / telex coms)
| equipment with pre-installed back-doors:
|
| <https://www.npr.org/2020/03/05/812499752/uncovering-the-
| cias...>
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG>
| grubbs wrote:
| It was Cisco routers that made the headlines. Not sure of
| other gear: https://www.engadget.com/2014-05-16-nsa-bugged-
| cisco-routers...
| craftkiller wrote:
| Yes there was. @48:48
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NFrjHmI35w&t=48m48s
| ikmckenz wrote:
| Photos of an NSA "upgrade" factory show Cisco router
| getting implant https://arstechnica.com/tech-
| policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa...
| g8oz wrote:
| No wonder the U.S is so worried about Huawei.
| dijit wrote:
| Guilty parties often cast the first accusation.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _Do you think Hezbollah was buying stuff from Israel, or
| otherwise using Israeli supply chains?_
|
| The modern supply chain is vastly deep. Iran can buy
| something from (IDK) India which might use software or
| hardware from Israel. As a further example, unless there's
| viable phone OS I don't know about, even Hezbollah will be
| using Android or iOS (and so buying from the US). etc.
|
| _I think it 's far more likely that Mossad has infiltrated
| whatever foreign (non-Israeli)_
|
| Maybe that is more likely. But I don't think my or your
| guesses matter so much as public perception. IE, it would
| change the situation that a given customer may look
| skeptically at an Israeli software or hardware product. Or
| they may not given that price and features trumps security
| and quality for nearly everything these days.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _So this can happen regardless of whether you 're using
| Israeli supply chains or not._
|
| The point is, would allies trust if it were China that pulled
| this off? Huawei/TikTok were thrown under the bus for way
| less.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I think the point is that if you're not Hezbollah or any kind
| of political actor, but just a customer for Israeli
| technology (public or private), would you really want to keep
| buying it? Leave aside boycotts over Israeli policy, you
| might be opening yourself to becoming an Israeli attack
| vector and either find your own interests compromised or
| become a target of Israel's enemies if they thought you were
| complicit.
| tomp wrote:
| What are you gonna buy? Chinese tech? Iranian tech? Russian
| tech?
|
| Who do you want to be able to spy on you and compromise
| your hardware?
|
| Unless you can spin up your own fab (hint: you can't)
| you're dependent on a hegemon. US/EU/Israel isn't perfect,
| but pretty much as good as it gets.
| frmersdog wrote:
| I know that this is rhetorical, but I'm sure an analysis
| of which country is least likely to leave you exposed to
| the issues mentioned above could be done. I suppose it
| also depends on who "you" are, and the threat of
| communications compromise vs drawing the ire of whoever
| Israel decides to attack through you. I'm sure there are
| plenty of countries that would rather be bugged by the
| Chinese or Iranians than be complicit in a way that opens
| them to actual armed conflict.
|
| This is another danger of letting Israel swing its sword
| around without any sort of real condemnation from the
| US/West: the rationale for geopolitical multi-polarity
| increases in legitimacy. Pax Americana ends because
| allying with us doesn't save you from being used as a
| tool for ends like this. If speculation is correct that
| Taiwan is involved... Woof.
| seydor wrote:
| > Who do you want to be able to spy on you
|
| I buy chinese IP cameras. China cannot block my bank
| account / employment / communications.
| dijit wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| All this fearmongering about telegram and tiktok is
| weird.
|
| China can decide what it wants from me- I have no plans
| to visit or engage with regime; however my life is
| dependent on the US not thinking of me as interesting.
|
| So, the less I give to US companies, the better.
|
| Especially as, being a non-US citizen I have no right to
| privacy afforded to me in the constitution, and US
| companies can be forced to comply with the government in
| secret- much in the same way we consider that China does
| it to even part-owned China based companies.
| darby_nine wrote:
| > US/EU/Israel isn't perfect, but pretty much as good as
| it gets.
|
| I imagine China is just as good in pretty much every way.
| computerex wrote:
| > US/EU/Israel isn't perfect, but pretty much as good as
| it gets.
|
| EU maybe, but US/Israel are as good as it gets? PRISM?
| Literally China/Russia are more trustworthy.
| xvector wrote:
| The EU? Anyone remember Crypto AG? Switzerland, I guess,
| but Schengen Area regardless.
| underdeserver wrote:
| Why not? When was anything Israeli-made involved in any
| funny business? I mean officially Israeli-made, not...
| this.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > In the short term, it's a smart strategy for Israel, but
| they've likely opened Pandora's box in the process.
|
| Did they? Supply chain attacks, intercepted parcels, none of
| this is new - the US, going by the Snowden leaks, has a long
| history of tampering with parcels in transit, which is why a
| few of the "libre phone" vendors offer to seal the parcel, the
| device and all screws in random glitter glue and take photos
| prior to shipping so that any attempt at tampering in transit
| is _not_ hideable (there is no known way to recreate a glitter
| pattern).
| barbazoo wrote:
| > 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...
| walthamstow wrote:
| If their comms are severely disrupted, yes. Even if it wasn't
| militarily effective, it's still quite a clever attack.
| John23832 wrote:
| Killing isn't always the goal.
|
| The effect of this "action" is the same as a bouncing betty.
| (I assume) The goal is to incapacitate and use resources.
| AustinDev wrote:
| The death toll isn't the goal. They're after the 2nd order
| effects, now there are ~3,000 operatives that are marked by a
| scar that is relatively distinctive. They also have
| substantially disrupted their communication protocols and
| caused psychological damage.
| Agingcoder wrote:
| Hezbollah members in Lebanon are not necessarily perceived
| as bad people - why would the scar be a problem ? Hezbollah
| claims it's a resistance movement to Israel, they're now
| wearing a scar caused by Israel in a mass coordinated
| attack, which will further legitimize Hezbollah.
|
| I agree with the disruption of communication protocols and
| psychological damage though.
| ars wrote:
| The scar marks an operative. Israel has a huge amount of
| video footage, now they work backward and see where that
| person went, and who they talked to.
| orochimaaru wrote:
| Is it all of Lebanon though? I think Christian and Druze
| Lebanese don't like the Hezbollah much anyway. Sure the
| Shiite south does but no one else.
| underdeserver wrote:
| I don't get it. Why does Lebanon need to resist Israel?
| When in recent history has Israel attacked Lebanon or
| threatened it in any way, except in retaliation or
| defense against Hezbollah acts?
| mongol wrote:
| In the first Lebanon war, Israel invaded Lebanon to
| strike against PLO. At this time, Hezbollah did not
| really exist, or was at least small and insignificant. It
| grew as a force in opposition of Israel's occupation.
| aksss wrote:
| This is on target. Tagging collaborators certainly has
| advantages, not so much for invoking a social glare at home
| but helping to identify them to intelligence sources,
| certainly.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I think the purpose is to terrorize your opponents. Sometimes
| getting seriously wounded is even worse than getting killed,
| from the perspective of Hez. Now they need to handle
| thousands of wounded members, which is much more expensive
| than dead ones.
| jsheard wrote:
| Who said the injured are all Hezbollah members? From the
| above Guardian coverage:
|
| _" Among those killed is an eight-year-old girl from Bekka
| Valley, Abiad said, according to Al Jazeera."_
|
| This CCTV footage shows one of the devices exploding in a
| busy supermarket:
|
| https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/dozens-
| hezbollah-m...
|
| Terrorizing your opponents is one thing, but
| indiscriminately detonating bombs in public spaces is just
| plain terrorism.
| yonisto wrote:
| indiscriminately? They were all used by Hezbollah
| operatives by definition. It is the most targeted
| operation if there ever was one.
| jsheard wrote:
| Indiscriminate in the sense that bombs have an area of
| effect beyond the person carrying them, so they couldn't
| possibly account for collateral damage when firing them
| all at once, and a conscious decision was made that any
| unlucky civilians are fair game. Indiscriminate in the
| same sense as dropping a bunker buster on a residential
| block because you believe there's a handful of terrorists
| inside, or nuking two cities to "encourage" a military
| surrender.
|
| If you believe this tactic was just, then I trust that if
| Mossad obliterated _your_ child in the process of
| assassinating an enemy of Israel who happened to be
| nearby then you would be able to forgive and forget,
| since it was for the greater good and they tried their
| best. Even if they were targeting the wrong person, as it
| sometimes goes:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillehammer_affair
|
| Incidentally when they later killed the actual target of
| that operation they did so by detonating a 100kg car bomb
| on a public road, also killing 4 civilians and injuring
| 16 others.
| sudopluto wrote:
| "unlucky civilians are fair game" that's been an
| unfortunate fact of war since, well, war was invented.
| maybe you should more angry at the people who started the
| war and put people in harms way, instead of complaining
| that one of the most precise operations still had
| unintended civilian consequences.
|
| taking the moral high ground is easy when you are not the
| one making decisions, and while the lesser of two evils
| (in your car bomb example) doesn't make sense on a
| personal level, it does make sense on a macro level
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _operatives_
|
| A lot of people seem to think Hezbollah is purely
| military in nature because of the 'terrorism' label. The
| organization was founded to respond to Israel's invasion
| of Lebanon, and while it is a militant organization it
| also has seats in the Lebanese parliament, engages in a
| lot of non-military activities, and does not have simple
| politics - for example, it has condemned Al Qaeda and
| ISIS for terroristic attacks.
|
| Labels such as 'terrorists' are as often designed to
| confuse as to inform. Reductionist categorization makes
| people easy to manipulate.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| The busy supermarket saw people standing directly beside
| the target perplexed and completely unharmed. This was
| extremely localized.
|
| If the child story is true (which is always in question),
| presumably they were tragically playing with the pager or
| the like at precisely that time.
|
| However the footage of the attack is overwhelmingly
| fighting-age males exclusively. As far as military
| operations go, that is remarkably targeted.
| S33V wrote:
| if someone next to you in a supermarket was wounded from
| an explosive like the video shows, do you think perplexed
| and completely unharmed would be a good description for
| your experience? Maybe we saw different videos, but it's
| pretty hard to make such a generalized statement from a
| few seconds of video.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| Yes? _Clearly_ the people directly beside the target were
| physically unharmed and confused about what happened. For
| all they knew the guy had an e-vape explode or something.
|
| Maybe in the future they'll carry some emotional damage
| or something, but living in a country de facto in a state
| of war with a formidable nuclear-power neighbour, while
| governed by a terrorist organization that
| indiscriminately fires rockets into civilian areas
| essentially daily, carries that risk, right? I doubt such
| an operation was a surprise to anyone.
| gojomo wrote:
| It looks like a trigger that can only be pulled once.
|
| Thus, choice of the optimal time could be influenced by a lot
| of things:
|
| - knowledge of other Hezbollah imminent action making comms
| disruption _right now_ of great importance
|
| - recognition that the vulnerability had been discovered and
| was about to be remediated
|
| - via other "eyes on" prime targets, knowledge that just one
| or two top leaders were briefly in especially-vulnerable
| positions (like sleeping alongside their pagers)
|
| - etc
|
| And, there will be a "long tail" of damage to Hezbollah's
| usual communications practices & trust in devices/suppliers.
| Some marginal recruits may even be deterred from joining a
| battle against an opponent which can carry out this sort of
| attack - though of course, others may be emboldened.
| dagaci wrote:
| TBH Israel does not concern itself about killing bystanders
| generally and our western press will also laser focus on
| hezbullah.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| It's not clear whether you're asserting Israel does or
| doesn't _care_ whether it kills civilians, though I think
| you 're saying it doesn't in general _try_ to accomplish
| this.
|
| Israel's history is decidedly chequered in this regard, and
| there have been killings, including quite recently of
| demonstrators / protestors, and within recent years of
| journalists, by Israeli forces.
|
| But there are also practices such as "roof knocking" in
| which an initial nonlethal warning is exploded above a
| building several minutes prior to a much more destructive
| strike:
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roof_knocking>
|
| Video of a roof-knock strike: <https://xcancel.com/AJEnglis
| h/status/1710690655091990644#m>
|
| The explosion seen doesn't significantly damage the
| building, that occurs in a later strike, shown as the first
| set of explosions here:
|
| <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=ZFTK9V_mEjI>
|
| (That clip follows with the initial roof-knock.)
|
| And to be clear, _much_ of Israel 's subsequent air and
| artillery assault on the Gaza strip has been far less
| surgical, with vast numbers of structures destroyed.
|
| By contrast, both Hamas and Hezbollah make extensive use of
| highly inaccurate missiles (totally unguided in the case of
| Hamas, guided though low-ish precision generally for
| Hezbollah) which are effectively aerial mines, striking
| randomly largely within civilian areas. This reflects both
| tactics and available means, so again the picture is
| complex. As I've written in an earlier comment on this
| thread, most hats are at best grey in these conflicts,
| rather than clearly white.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| Idk who exactly was hit but losing a hand will definitely
| hurt ones ability to fight.
| Atotalnoob wrote:
| Killing is one thing, but wounded soldiers/operatives are a
| much larger drain on resources than killing.
|
| The wounded people need care, medicine, rehab, therapy, and
| feeding during their recovery.
|
| This occupies significant resources of your enemy.
|
| I'm not commenting on this specific attack, but talking in
| general.
| rocqua wrote:
| If this were coordinated with a ground attack on Hezbollah,
| it would be a great way to disrupt any defense right before
| it needs to offer resistance.
|
| I'm surprised they used it out of such a concept. It is
| almost heartening, because it suggests no such attack is
| currently anticipated by Israel.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| 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.
| elorant wrote:
| It surely is because you corrode your target's trust in
| technology. They moved from smartphones to pagers, now
| they'll have to find even cruder types of communications.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| 500 blinded
| hello_computer wrote:
| BDS looks better and better with each passing day.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| BDS?
| ruthie_cohen wrote:
| Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boycott,_Divestment_and_San
| c...
| mynameishere wrote:
| Israel used letter bombs for a long time to assassinate and
| terrorize. People didn't stop using the mail because of that,
| but upgraded their opsec.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| IMO, this gives IL's enemies more excuses to execute more
| horrible attacks. Considering pagers are civilian products and
| some of them might actually be delivered to non-Hez civilians,
| the consequence is pretty dire.
|
| it basically says: we can do whatever we want because we can.
| Now imagine what the other side is going to reply.
| kranke155 wrote:
| The other side was already doing everything it could.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Definitely not. Hez has showed footages of UAVs inside of
| IL so potentially they _could_ do some damage. They can
| also up their missile attacks. And there are other players
| such as the Houthis. Maybe they just don 't want to do it
| because they figured it's of no good to them at the moment,
| but maybe the climate changes in the future and they decide
| to do it anyway.
| rabidonrails wrote:
| This is true of both sides.
|
| Also important to remember is that Israel evacuated the
| civilian population in the north of the country due to
| Hezbollah currently indiscriminately shelling/bombing
| that area for the past months.
| astrange wrote:
| Iran/Hezbollah are more known for constantly announcing
| they're about to do everything they can, and then not doing
| it. Safer that way.
| underdeserver wrote:
| They've been firing hundreds of rockets, daily, into Israeli
| territory. You think they need more excuses to do anything?
| DevX101 wrote:
| 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.
| carapace wrote:
| > I can't help but wonder about its long-term consequences.
|
| War is over.
|
| The long-term consequences are that we use our words instead of
| exothermic reactions to reach livable compromises.
| shmatt wrote:
| israel wasn't identified as israel, and hizbolla weren't
| identified of hizbolla
|
| much of the work of a CIA or Mossad agent isn't breaking in to
| this house or murdering that person. It's working as an
| executive in a shell company
|
| No one is going to sell a terrorist organization thousands of
| new beepers. The hizbolla probably also created shell
| companies. Israel knew their cover and approached them as a
| foreign seller. Everyone is lying to everyone
|
| In reality the supply chain space is probably full of shell
| companies from all different terrorist organizations and
| western countries
| riazrizvi wrote:
| Isn't political isolation a strategy in extremism movements? It
| encourages some people in the middle to move into your camp,
| while others who move away can become convenient enemies. So
| from my understanding, the consequences are possibly considered
| another benefit for the country's current government.
| random9749832 wrote:
| Everytime you say Israel you must insert US, just as you must
| insert Iran every time you mention Palestine. These are who the
| war is between. Hamas or Hezbollah by itself is nothing and so
| is a <10 million population fighting several adversaries. And
| the US will always win in escalation which is exactly what they
| have aimed to achieve and why Iran never gave a 'proper'
| response to the assassination of Haniyeh.
| rolux wrote:
| > In the short term, it's a smart strategy for Israel, but
| they've likely opened Pandora's box in the process.
|
| Absolutely. From today on, this type of attack will have to be
| considered part of the arsenal.
|
| While building thousands of explosive communication devices and
| swapping a large shipment requires substantial resources and
| intelligence, the actual "sophistication" of today's attack
| seems to lie in the fact that the perpetrator managed to
| specifically target a clandestine adversarial organization.
|
| If you don't care about that last part, I don't think it's
| completely out of reach for a hypothetical "state sponsored
| terrorist organization" to have a thousand smart phone
| explosives shipped into a target market, say the European Union
| or the United States. Such an attack, if successful, would be
| devastating.
| bluefishinit wrote:
| I don't think the Times Of Israel is an unbiased source. This
| isn't trustworthy reporting.
| izwasm wrote:
| 8 year old girl was dead there, not only hezbollah members uses
| it, hospitals uses it too
| wsc981 wrote:
| If it's a child sitting on the lap with her father, and her
| father is related to Hezbollah (and as such carrying a pager),
| this stuff could happen, I think.
|
| All in all horrible to be honest ...
| morkalork wrote:
| Apparently a message was sent to the pagers right before
| exploding. I saw in a couple videos where the victim looked
| down at their hip and angled it to see the screen. It makes
| sense as a trick to ensure the target is close by when it
| goes off, but a kid could just as easily pick it up off a
| table after hearing it buzz.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| As I'm trying to better understand the situation from a
| technology perspective, I'm curious: has anyone experienced a
| lithium battery catastrophically failing during use (not
| charging) and without plenty of warning (ie. gets warm, hot,
| scalding)?
|
| My experience has been that at worst, they overheat over minutes
| to hours, and then hiss, smoke, pop, and catch fire.
|
| I guess what I'm wondering is: is it at all plausible that this
| happened without the use of some amount of added explosives?
| (edit: I saw a few videos. I cannot imagine a mobile lithium
| battery is capable of such a sudden and violent explosion)
| tptacek wrote:
| It's probably going to turn out to be supply chain and
| explosives.
| zelias wrote:
| 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
| ofcrpls wrote:
| 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
| dewey wrote:
| Really good book, I've just finished it a few weeks ago and
| can recommend it.
| carstenhag wrote:
| Also related, but rather a malware attack: Europol/French
| Police compromising all Encrochat phones in 2020.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| For those who don't know, "EncroChat was a Europe-based
| communications network and service provider that offered
| modified smartphones allowing encrypted communication among
| subscribers. It was used primarily by organized crime members
| to plan criminal activities."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EncroChat
| apienx wrote:
| "These devices don't appear to be designed to be lethal.[..] They
| are, for the most part, low charge so not packing enough to
| actually kill somebody.[..] Let's not forget that this comes on
| the same day that Israel has extended its war aims to including
| expelling Hezbollah basically from the border." -- BBC's Security
| Correspondent Frank Gardner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNEb-
| dY3tRY
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Just to put some numbers on that, ToI are presently reporting 9
| deaths and 2,800 injuries (those numbers are of course
| preliminary and very much in flux), which taking the 2nd value
| as a denominator would be a <1% lethality rate. The BBC's
| characterisation does seem to be accurate.
|
| <https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog-september-17-2024/>
| rany_ wrote:
| I'm not sure if I'm allowed to link to a gory video, but there
| is commonly circulating video of a pager detonating in a
| grocery store. There are a few people around the man but only
| the man appears to be impacted, all bystanders seem OK.
|
| Media is reporting that most casualties are caused by the pager
| detonating while driving. Obviously because it would impact
| other drivers that happen to be around the now incapacitated
| driver.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| While a clever attack it's also highly likely there was
| collateral damage to nonviolent or noninvolved bystanders.
| bigbinary wrote:
| Already confirmed as there is one 8 year old girl reportedly in
| the fatalities. This attack will add to the stereotype that
| Israel attacks indiscriminately.
| autoexec wrote:
| Is "stereotype" the right word when it accurately describes
| what's been happening? Amnesty International, the UN, and
| even the president of the United States have described their
| attacks as "indiscriminate".
| bigbinary wrote:
| Tbh I only use the word stereotypes because speaking in
| absolutes here leads to really grimy political discussions
| with under the guise of semantic or technical discussions.
| Anyone with eyes can see that Israel acts with protection
| of the US military and has no reason to be specific with
| their targets, even while being scolded by that military
| judah wrote:
| 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.
| kamikazeturtles wrote:
| If the man is unarmed, I don't think they can be considered a
| legitimate target. If that is the case, then you could argue
| all Israelis who have a military background are legitimate
| targets and that includes most of the population.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| The concept of legitimate targets is from the Geneva
| convention.
|
| > A fundamental premise of the Geneva Conventions has been
| that to earn the right to protection as military fighters,
| soldiers must distinguish themselves from civilians by
| wearing uniforms and carrying their weapons openly
|
| Hezbollah fighters clearly aren't doing this and this is
| whether the fundamental argument around how Israel behaves
| comes from - what is a legitimate target and rules of
| engagement when the fighting force blends itself into the
| general populace? For all the criticism, Israel by some
| accounts does seem to do better than the US in similar
| circumstances when they were in Iraq and Afghanistan in
| terms of protecting civilian populations. And for all their
| criticism (some well deserved some not) they could
| certainly be even more indiscriminate in their targeting.
| rany_ wrote:
| > Hezbollah fighters clearly aren't doing this
|
| What do you mean? I am not in any way supporting
| Hezbollah but their soldiers are definitely "wearing
| uniforms and carrying their weapons openly." Hamas and
| Hezbollah are not the same. Hamas is more decentralized
| though so that doesn't happen as often in that case.
| Hezbollah soldiers are also salaried and more properly
| equipped by Iran/Syria.
|
| The biggest difference between Hezbollah and Hamas is
| that in Hezbollah's case, their soldiers are more
| motivated by money rather than ideology. They treat it
| more like a "professional" job, work for promotions, and
| dress accordingly. It's a significantly more top-down
| structure too.
| timnetworks wrote:
| To paraphrase a guy on the 'tube, intelligence officers are
| seldom armed with more than a ham sandwich but are still
| legitimate targets.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Link to the video (which AFAICT contains no gore, but is
| obviously not pleasant):
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/17/world/video/hezbollah-
| pagers-...
| chrisco255 wrote:
| That's just the videos that have been published and the ones
| that happened to be captured by CCTV. If 1000 devices were
| indiscriminately detonated, even a 5% collateral damage rate
| would mean up to 50 innocent people harmed, maimed, or
| killed. At 15%, 150, and so forth.
| elintknower wrote:
| I wonder if this is possible in devices that actually use a small
| asic to handle all aspects of battery control. They're even more
| complex than a BMS, for instance macbook batteries have had these
| for around 20 years [0]. They're even common in vapes and vape
| batteries. I have to wonder if these asics can be bypassed with
| malware?
|
| Seems like the cells in these pagers were massively over-
| discharged and then allowed to be over charged? Potentially a
| capacitor used to drive the vibration motor was then used to
| cause the battery to catastrophically explode?
|
| 0 - https://squidgeefish.com/projects/a1175-battery-hacking/
| hpone91 wrote:
| Someone must have watched Knock Off from 1998
| janmo wrote:
| 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 laptop/phone to check if the
| weight differs from its original weight, it should not deviate.
| diggan wrote:
| > 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 also
| calibrated right before) I get 133.5g, so it's ~1.5g off.
|
| Measuring a 50g weight gives me exactly 50g, so the scale is
| correct, so either the weight of my phone is off, or Apple
| doesn't give exact weight.
| janmo wrote:
| I guess it is better to weigh it just after the purchase from
| a random store and from there the weight should never change.
| dbtablesorrows wrote:
| Are you in hezbollah as well?
| diggan wrote:
| If so, I'd expect my phone to weigh too much rather than
| too little, because of the added explosives.
| tzs wrote:
| What if they replaced the battery with a physically
| smaller battery to make room for the explosives? If the
| explosives are less dense than the battery the rigged
| phone would weigh less than the original.
| fwip wrote:
| Where do they do this? Do they pick up the package at the post
| office distribution center?
| janmo wrote:
| In my case they did it at the store where I came to pick it
| up. That's how I got aware of it.
|
| The espionage agency in question was the french DGSI.
| kart23 wrote:
| someone in the US government is probably freaking out about all
| these iphones and macbooks made in china right now.
| xeonmc wrote:
| Evocative of the "power user" scene from Iron Sky[0]
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXWovt5-wfk
| tptacek wrote:
| Probably not so much, no.
| 0x_rs wrote:
| Seems old pagers were replaced last month at the American
| University of Beirut. It may or may not have to do with this
| operation, but the timing seems very suspect. Those devices may
| have been tampered with explosives at some point before being
| distributed to the victims.
|
| https://x.com/gazanotice/status/1836082218805891360
| whimsicalism wrote:
| probably unrelated, lebanon is a big place
| jakeinspace wrote:
| It's a very small place
| timnetworks wrote:
| https://x.com/AUBMC_Official/status/1836086847153320148
| germandiago wrote:
| It was a cyberattack from Israel some rumours say.
| sroussey wrote:
| Did the pagers all receive the same text message before they
| exploded?
| gmd63 wrote:
| Another example of why outsourcing manufacturing is a national
| security concern, and how the absolute free market can lead
| "winners" to harm themselves by chasing "success" at all costs.
| skapadia wrote:
| 100% this.
| knallfrosch wrote:
| Do you think manufacturing pagers in Lebanon is a viable
| alternative?
| bowmessage wrote:
| Undoubtedly, this attack has proven that it certainly is, at
| whatever cost.
| dijit wrote:
| The idea of the majority of manufacturing being external to a
| country is a little under 100 years old, yet people talk as
| if it is unthinkable.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| lebanon has an economy that's currently in shambles, and
| its never been known for its productive capacity. even if
| they wanted to start making simple comms devices it might
| rely on infrastructure that they can't invest in, and take
| tech/capital they have not accumulated
|
| it would be more realistic for them to receive it from the
| iran but there might be political hurdles to this and it
| would end up costing the iranians as hezbollah can't be
| expected to pay much for it
| dredmorbius wrote:
| There are probably Muslim-aligned and sympathetic countries
| in which such manufacturing might occur.
|
| Perhaps not national self-sufficiency, but global-bloc self-
| sufficiency. The principal groups I'd suggest would be
| "Western" democracies (US, EU, UK, JP, KR, CA, AU, NZ),
| Russian-aligned states (RU, BY, CU, possibly IR), China
| somewhat independent though RU-friendly, Islamic states
| (Levant generally, much of the Middle East, North Africa, ID,
| PK, _NOT_ Iran), and perhaps groups of African and Latin
| American states, though the latter two would generally fall
| under the Western umbrella.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| Doesn't matter, they could have intercepted a shipment and done
| the same thing
| postalrat wrote:
| It does matter if it would have been much more difficult to
| intercept the shipment that never left Lebanon.
| elteto wrote:
| This almost reads like science fiction, what an incredible attack
| from a technical POV. A couple of thoughts:
|
| 1. The beepers were compromised and have been for a long time. I
| don't know how easy it is to exfiltrate data from them if they
| are receive-only devices. At any rate it shows that Israel is
| capable of intercepting and manipulating low-tech comms. What's
| left for Hezbollah to use?
|
| 2. The next step is to hack into hospital record systems and get
| a list of all patients admitted today.
| spacephysics wrote:
| Unfortunately innocent people were also harmed, don't think a
| straight list will serve anyone
|
| Honestly I doubt Israel/Mossad doesn't know _who_ is in
| Hezbollah, i think this is more of a direct attack (obviously)
| mixed with scare /terror benefit
| elteto wrote:
| I think the value is in knowing the network and cross-
| reference against it. Innocent bystanders or people who
| happened to just go to the hospital today will probably fall
| off during this process. Not to mention that you can filter
| out by the type of injury to get a more accurate list.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > 1. The beepers were compromised and have been for a long
| time.
|
| Where did you see this? Sources are saying that Hezbollah
| recently upgraded their pagers with the American University of
| Beirut on August 29:
|
| https://x.com/gazanotice/status/1836082218805891360
|
| Why would Israel have the ability to wipe out a good chunk of
| Hezbollah for years and just sat on it until now?
|
| They are claiming 2750 injuries:
|
| https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/9/17/dozens-of-hezbollah...
| elteto wrote:
| I wasn't thinking years, but months but I didn't know about
| the recent upgrade. At any rate, if the pagers allowed any
| data exfiltration they have been collecting that data since
| whenever the last upgrade was.
| adrian_b wrote:
| The reason for using pagers instead of phones is that they
| are receivers only, they do not transmit, therefore they
| cannot be localized.
|
| So no data exfiltration was possible using the pagers. The
| only purpose of the modified pagers was to maim or kill
| their possessors, by detonating all of them simultaneously.
| foundart wrote:
| Some kinds of receivers can be localized because they
| convert input frequencies to a standard internal
| frequency for more convenient processing. See https://en.
| wikipedia.org/wiki/Superheterodyne_receiver#Local...
|
| It's how the TV detectors work in countries, such as the
| UK, that charge a license fee for TVs.
|
| Military radios can't use this common technique because
| of the risk of detection.
|
| I suspect pagers only receive on 1 or at most a few
| frequencies. If that's correct, they wouldn't need that
| technique.
| vel0city wrote:
| It is still way more difficult to localize a local
| oscillator (especially one that's trying even slightly to
| shield itself) than something trying to transmit to a
| tower a few miles away.
| fabioborellini wrote:
| So they missed incapacitating a hospital, which changed to
| smart phones. Are you sure it was Mossad?
| anonu wrote:
| > Hezbollah recently upgraded their pagers with the American
| University of Beirut
|
| Please do not conflate Hezbollah and AUB.
|
| The claim is that AUB medical school pagers were replaced a
| week or so ago. This is either pure coincidence, false or
| fake news to imply that AUB has Israeli operatives, or indeed
| that the pagers used were compromised and that the USA was
| aware of the impending attack and did not want to harm AUB
| medical staff - who probably are mostly not connected with
| Hezbollah.
|
| Further reading:
| https://x.com/AUBMC_Official/status/1836086847153320148
| EasyMark wrote:
| It's hard to believe none of these beepers have failed before
| this and the explosives found by a beeper repair person
| bhouston wrote:
| Seems like a harbrining of war, if the pager network was
| compromised, thus burns the compromised network and also harms a
| lot of people.
|
| Most major newspapers in Israel are saying that Netanyahu wants
| an invasion of Southern Lebanon:
|
| https://www.ynetnews.com/article/bje3pjv60
|
| https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-conflict/article-820399
|
| https://www.timesofisrael.com/top-general-said-pushing-for-g...
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| Lebanon has been shooting rockets at Israel for a while now.
| They already are at war. It's just Israel is very strategic
| about its steps.
| bhouston wrote:
| > Lebanon has been shooting rockets at Israel for a while
| now.
|
| Correction: Israel and Lebanon have been firing across the
| border for a while. More Israeli attacks on Lebanon than the
| other way around and more Lebanese dead too.
|
| Details:
|
| https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/6/27/mapping-7400-cross-.
| ..
|
| https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/800/cpsprodpb/bfa9/live/320f24.
| ..
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cv2gj544x65o
|
| And lots more details here:
|
| "Between 21 October 2023 and 20 February 2024 the United
| Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) recorded an
| estimated 7,948 incidents of artillery fire from the south of
| the Blue Line (from Israel to Lebanon) and 978 incidents of
| artillery fire from the north side (from Lebanon to Israel)."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel-
| Hezbollah_conflict_(202...
| cubefox wrote:
| The question is who started shooting rockets at the
| territory of the other. I would be surprised if it was
| Israel.
| bhouston wrote:
| > The question is who started shooting rockets at the
| territory of the other.
|
| I think you can always go back further. A good overview
| is this article on the history of Hezbollah-Israel
| conflict, with links to the various flare-ups:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezbollah-Israel_conflict
| tptacek wrote:
| What makes sense is going back to the last durable
| cessation of hostilities, not tracing every event back to
| the Battle of Jericho.
| einszwei wrote:
| The answer isn't straight forward. 1980s invasion of
| Lebanon by Israel and it's withdrawal in 2000 was what
| made Hezbollah into the force that it is today.
|
| The conflict has been simmering for decades
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| I think the answer is fairly straightforward if you limit
| it to the current round in the conflict
|
| Not to mention that Israel is no longer in Lebanon and
| Hezbollah can just stop firing rockets and the situation
| will go back to relative peace.
|
| So sure the history is complicated, but current events
| are fairly straightfoward, you had relatively peaceful
| status que until Hezbollah broke it.
| nick_ wrote:
| I mean... yes... if you limit any context by excluding
| important elements of the context the takeaways will be
| different.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| So given the context, why is Hezbollah not responsible
| for the current escalation?
|
| Hezbollah was founded to drive Israel out of Lebanon, and
| Israel is no longer in Lebanon, so not sure how that
| context makes any difference to who started and is to
| blame for the current round of escalation.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Texas sharpshooter fallacy
| yoavm wrote:
| The answer is pretty straight forward in the sense that
| the current round of war was initiated (proudly) by
| Hezbollah, and that while if Hezbollah stops shooting
| Israel would have no business with Lebanon, if Israel
| stops shooting into Lebanon Hezbollah has no intention of
| stopping too. Hezbollah wants to destroy Israel (they say
| that, not me), while Israel has no desire to destroy
| Lebanon. Hinting at some kind of symmetry here seems
| weird.
|
| Israel invading into Lebanon in the late 1970 was a
| response to an attack originating there [0].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastal_Road_massacre#I
| sraeli_...
| pphysch wrote:
| > Hinting at some kind of symmetry here seems weird.
|
| Both sides (Israeli state, and Hezbollah) want to destroy
| each other. It's a simple symmetry. Conflating the
| military force with the territory and civilians living on
| it only obfuscates this.
| yoavm wrote:
| Yeah, it's symmetrical as saying that "Both Nazis and
| Jews wanted to kill each other". But Israel wants to
| destroy Hezbollah (not Lebanon) precisely because
| Hezbollah wants to destroy Israel, while Hezbollah wants
| to destroy Israel because it exists.
| pphysch wrote:
| Sorry, I can't take you seriously when you equate a
| clearly defined military-political organization
| ("Hezbollah") with a broad ethnoreligious group ("Jews").
| That's totally absurd and borders on Holocaust denial.
| luckylion wrote:
| > Both sides (Israeli state, and Hezbollah) want to
| destroy each other.
|
| Have Hezbollah lay down their arms and convert their
| organization to peaceful gardeners and Israel has no
| interest in destroying them.
|
| Have Israel lay down their arms and focus on peaceful
| gardening and few Israeli Jews will survive.
|
| Such Symmetry. Enlightened Reddit really is something
| else.
| someotherperson wrote:
| > Have Israel lay down their arms and focus on peaceful
| gardening and few Israeli Jews will survive.
|
| That's because the entire notion of Israel as a concept
| is predicated on it being under constant existential
| threats.
|
| If Hezbollah goes away, then nothing changes in Lebanon:
| Lebanese identity isn't based on armed resistance.
| Israeli identity, however, has _nothing else_ going for
| it besides armed conflict.
|
| If conflicts were to go away, so would Israel. Israeli
| Jews would just be absorbed into whatever local culture
| they're in, just as they were prior to the formation of
| Israel (and just like they are outside of Israel). The
| remaining ones would be the ones engaging in armed
| conflict -- just as the original groups like Irgun and
| Lehi were.
| yoavm wrote:
| This is quiet an entertaining thought! What about this
| option: if Hezbollah goes away, Lebanon can actually
| become a functioning state, have electricity, not have
| its main port explode sometimes, people will be able to
| fuel their cars and the gas Lebanon has at sea will be
| used to rebuild the country.
|
| If Israel had no conflicts it could focus more on high-
| tech & agri-tech, it will become more secular and less
| extremist, and many Jews (like myself) who left it would
| love to go back and live there because they wouldn't be
| afraid for their lives anymore.
|
| edit: I'm also wondering, is it just Israel that has
| "nothing else going for it besides armed conflict"? Is it
| an Israeli thing? a Jewish thing? How come French people
| can just be French without a war, Swedes can be Swedes,
| without being "absorbed", but Israelis have nothing go
| for them?
| someotherperson wrote:
| An ethno-nationalist state becoming more secular and less
| extremist? I'm intrigued. Do you believe that the
| settlements would stop and that Palestinians would be
| given Israeli citizenship? Would the Palestinians forced
| out of Israel be allowed to return in this case?
|
| Or is this secular, less extremist, conflict-free Israel
| predicated on Israel continuing to be majority Jewish and
| with a Jewish government?
|
| Edit for your edit: no, nothing to do with Jews. South +
| North Korea, Taiwan, Ukraine, Singapore, the baltic
| countries (Estonia etc). Various Arab countries too. In
| Israel's case the population are made of diaspora which
| multiplies the effect.
| yoavm wrote:
| > that the settlements would stop
|
| I believe that the biggest barrier to removing the
| settlements is the war. Events like October 7th made the
| concern real in many Israelis minds - the idea of "we
| took out the settlements[0], and now their shooting
| missiles from nearby" is the numbers #1 reason right-wing
| Israelis use to justify not leaving the land.
|
| > that Palestinians would be given Israeli citizenship?
|
| More than 20% of all Israeli citizenship holders are
| Palestinians. I'm not sure which others Palestinians you
| refer to - if you're talking about the West Bank and
| Gaza, I believe they'd receive a Palestinian citizenship.
|
| > Would the Palestinians forced out of Israel be allowed
| to return in this case
|
| This was never a realistic idea. Sure some of them can
| return, but most of the places Palestinians left during
| the war they started on Israel 1947 don't have empty
| houses once can just "return" to. They shall receive
| partitions under some plan.
|
| > Or is this secular, less extremist, conflict-free
| Israel predicated on Israel continuing to be majority
| Jewish and with a Jewish government?
|
| Israel will continue to have Jewish majority, and
| Palestine will continue to have a Palestinian majority.
| French will have a French majority, and Sweden will have
| a Swedish majority. I know, it's a crazy idea.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_disengagement_f
| rom_the...
| someotherperson wrote:
| So in this hypothetical scenario where everything is
| flowers and sunshine, the secular, peaceful Israel is
| still an ethnostate with a two-state outcome that keeps
| its ethnic cleansing-attained Jewish majority.
|
| It's wild to me that this is what you consider the best
| case scenario in a situation where Israel is experiencing
| complete peace. And then ending it with an unintentional
| "nur fur Deutsche" reference. The Sweden reference is
| especially apt, given that's what the Swedish Antisemitic
| Union also used as a slogan[0]
|
| > but most of the places Palestinians left during the war
| they started on Israel 1947
|
| You really can't help yourself huh.
|
| [0]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_Antisemitic_Union
| someotherperson wrote:
| > the current round of war
|
| Israel has been attacking Hezbollah non-stop in Syria for
| the last decade[0]. "The current round of war" is quite
| literally just Hezbollah firing back.
|
| It's strange to me how Israel is able to fly sorties
| around the entire region and it's not considered an
| escalation, but the moment that we see responses it turns
| into the other side being the aggressor.
|
| > while Israel has no desire to destroy Lebanon
|
| The Israeli Dahiya doctrine[1] is literally based on the
| idea of destroying as much of Lebanon as possible to
| screw with Hezbollah's support and morale.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Israel_con
| flict_d...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahiya_doctrine
| yoavm wrote:
| Even the spokesperson of Hezbollah wouldn't say that the
| current round of war is "literally just Hezbollah firing
| back". If you're joking then I'm sorry for not catching
| it, but if not - Hezbollah announced that it's attacking
| Israel in support of Hamas's attack on Israel.
|
| As for your second point, you're pointing to an Israeli
| strategy of fighting Hezbollah by pressuring Lebanese
| citizens against it. This has nothing to do with having
| the demolition of Lebanon as a goal.
|
| Edit: I also recommend you read the Hebrew version of the
| Dahiya doctrine wikipage. As the doctrine is Israeli and
| in Hebrew originally, it explains it in much greater
| details. The doctrine has nothing to do with destroying
| Lebanon.
| einszwei wrote:
| Hezbollah didn't exist in 1970s. It was founded in 1982
|
| Like the famous quote said "We make peace with our
| enemies, not our friends" (I can't recall the source) -
| what is lacking here is diplomacy.
|
| To repeat - Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1980s was the
| catalyst for Hezbollah's rise. While they curbed PLO they
| created a more formidable adversary.
| yoavm wrote:
| First, I forgot an 's there - I meant 1970s. Second,
| unfortunately for Lebanon, Hezbollah wasn't the only
| terrorist organization growing in it [0]. "The proximate
| cause of the Israeli invasion was the Coastal Road
| massacre that took place near Tel Aviv on 11 March 1978"
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_South_Lebanon_conflict
| einszwei wrote:
| Hezbollah was founded in 1982. With benefit of hindsight
| we can see that while Israel's Lebanon Invasion in 1980s
| was successful in curbing the PLO who perpetrated the
| massacre, they created a more formidable adversary in
| form of Hezbollah.
| yoavm wrote:
| So maybe Israel invading Lebanon in the late 1970s wasn't
| the best idea. I guess they should have time-traveled to
| 2024 and consult with you, but unfortunately that didn't
| happen. However my point wasn't that the invasion was a
| great idea, but that the initiator of the conflict
| between Lebanon (or Hezbollah) with Israel is Hezbollah.
| lxgr wrote:
| > if the pager network was compromised, thus burns the
| compromised network
|
| I wouldn't necessarily call this type of attack a network
| compromise. All it takes is knowing the target phone numbers
| and sending a specific message, which is a paging network
| working exactly as designed. Phone detonated bombs have been a
| thing for a long time too.
|
| Calling it a hardware supply chain attack seems more accurate.
| mmastrac wrote:
| 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 the
| pagers at the same time. You've just injured and identified most
| of your enemies, incapacitated them, completely broken their
| communication network and effectively given you weeks of disarray
| to do whatever you want to further disrupt them.
|
| You have to hand it to them -- it's a clever strategy with
| minimal casualties outside of your enemy. This is a Stuxnet-level
| hack that we'll probably never fully understand.
| dmvdoug wrote:
| Just Mossad Mossadin'.
| koolba wrote:
| > Hack the backend server, send a coordinated page to all the
| pagers at the same time.
|
| You likely don't even need to hack anything if you coordinate
| based on time. A built in clock would eliminate the need for
| any external signal and work in a, no pun intended, dead zone.
|
| If the pager itself is hacked, the software could also pretend
| to receive a page a moment before detonation to maximize the
| chance the device is held with the receiver in the open.
| ars wrote:
| It wasn't time based. Videos show the pager making some kind
| of signal or message that caused the person holding it to
| look at it.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| That doesn't follow. You could have a timer that causes the
| pager to vibrate as if it had received a message or an
| alarm had rung. That would make the attack simpler, in that
| one wouldn't also have to compromise (or risk leaving
| traces in) the phone system to activate thousands of
| pagers.
| rocqua wrote:
| I'd imagine a backup timer, with the ability to trigger
| early if required for strategic or tactical purposes.
|
| I almost surprised this wasn't coordinated with (or saved
| for) an incursion into Libanon. That seems to be
| something Israel wants to do, and this would be a great
| way to disrupt the defense at the most critical moment.
| ars wrote:
| A timer is too risky. The was done months in advance -
| what if the war was over?
|
| I think this was meant for intelligence gathering - now
| that they know who the important operatives are, you go
| backwards using video and see where they went and who
| they talked to.
| blantonl wrote:
| Pagers just simply have an address (called a Cap Code) to
| receive messages. It's like a mailbox number. A pager can
| be programmed with usually up to 4 Cap Codes at a time.
|
| If I was speculating on what happened, I would bet that
| the pager had 3 Cap Code addresses programmed, the
| mailbox cap code the owner of the pager expected to have
| for receiving messages, a cap code that was the same
| programmed in all the pagers to that functioned normally
| to received messages, and then the 3rd cap code
| programmed in all the pagers that when receiving a
| specific message triggered the explosive.
|
| The folks responsible simply sent a message to the 2nd
| cap code to get all the pagers to go off, presumably to
| get the targets to get the pagers out and look at them,
| and then immediately the trigger message next to the 3rd
| cap code to detonate the explosive.
| koolba wrote:
| I'm saying even that could be time based to ensure it does
| not depend on the signal being received. Just pretend you
| got a message and add a delay of a couple seconds.
| ars wrote:
| It could be, but it would be very risky. These pagers
| would have been distributed months in advance. How could
| you possibly know the perfect time to set them off?
|
| And since pagers are already receiving remote messages,
| it doesn't make sense to do it any other way.
| grotorea wrote:
| Is the pager thing really recent? Because if this was done
| before the current war they couldn't have known when they
| wanted it to explode.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/pagers-drones-
| how-...
| make3 wrote:
| if you physically control the pager I don't even think it's
| called hacking anymore. you can change the hardware and
| software willy nilly. put an extra SIM that you control in
| there, and call it. put a radio receiver. a timer. heck, a
| dog whistle audio detector, you blow it and they blow up.
| infinite possibilities.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| I mean they probably did hack to some degree the default
| software/hardware in the pager to get it to do something
| nonstandard. I doubt they have access to the full source
| code and build stack of the OG pager, so even just
| modifying the software running on it to do something
| different is indeed a hack.
| blantonl wrote:
| Pagers don't have SIMs, they are simply programmed with a
| "Cap Code" which is basically the address of the pager.
|
| Pagers can be programmed with multiple cap codes, and can
| function differently based on which cap code address
| receives a message. For instance, a single cap code could
| be programmed to just vibrate the pager, vs an audible
| alert.
|
| Pagers are sent out via very high power distributed
| transmitters as one way transmissions simulcasted
| transmissions.
|
| The format is typically:
|
| [CAP CODE] - Message
|
| That's literally it.
| bilinguliar wrote:
| It most likely just received a code message that triggered
| the device.
| kranke155 wrote:
| Someone will eventually spill the beans on how it was done.
| They always do.
| underdeserver wrote:
| 30 years from now, maybe.
| nashashmi wrote:
| It is a well known hack.
| xenospn wrote:
| page me when they do
| superxpro12 wrote:
| FWIW, AP is reporting over 2800 injured, 200 seriously, with
| only 8 dead.
| aksss wrote:
| Seeing some video from one of the hospitals, there's a lot of
| variety to the injuries. It looks like some people were
| looking at the pager when it exploded (injury to face and
| hand), some were wearing it on hip, some in pocket, some
| probably in an across-the-chest fanny pack.
|
| It would seem this attack has managed to kill some, maim
| many, tag all, terrorize, and disrupt.
| sph wrote:
| > You have to hand it to them
|
| Given the context and peculiar choice of words, this reminds me
| of a classic @dril tweet
|
| https://x.com/dril/status/831805955402776576?s=46
| rendang wrote:
| TBH, I would "hand it to" any group who pulled off this
| particular attack, even ISIL.
| tootie wrote:
| > minimal casualties
|
| We'll see about that. Some of the footage indicates the targets
| were all just out and about in public. I think it's likely
| there will be collateral damage. I assume it didn't happen
| since it's not being reported, but what if one of them was on a
| plane?
| aqme28 wrote:
| > minimal casualties outside of your enemy.
|
| "Thousands injured." I'm not convinced it was as super-targeted
| as you claim.
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| FWIW, Hezbollah has thousands of members.
|
| From Wikipedia [1]:
|
| > Hezbollah does not reveal its armed strength. The Dubai-
| based Gulf Research Centre estimated in 2006 that Hezbollah's
| armed wing comprises 1,000 full-time Hezbollah members, along
| with a further 6,000-10,000 volunteers.[200] According to the
| Iranian Fars News Agency, Hezbollah has up to 65,000
| fighters.[201] In October 2023, Al Jazeera cited Hezbollah
| expert Nicholas Blanford as estimating that Hezbollah has at
| least 60,000 fighters, including full-time and reservists,
| and that it had increased its stockpile of missiles from
| 14,000 in 2006 to about 150,000.
|
| And this is just the armed portion.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezbollah
| CydeWeys wrote:
| You underestimate how many members Hezbollah has, and also,
| how unreliable these kinds of initial reports tend to be.
| captainkrtek wrote:
| > 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.)
| ignoramous wrote:
| Looks like Lebanese civilians have indeed been
| injured/maimed; but it appears _cool_ to some since it is an
| "impressive supply-chain hack", so let's leave it at that and
| not call it _terrorism_.
| csmpltn wrote:
| You could've labeled it terrorism had Lebanon and Israel
| weren't at war with each other over the past 12 months, and
| had the people carrying those devices were random
| uninvolved civilians.
|
| If you were to consider the fact that Hezbollah has been
| shelling Israeli cities and civilians on a daily basis for
| the past 12 months (killing many, also children, and
| driving hundreds of thousands of people out of their
| homes), with the UN peacekeeping force failing to keep
| Hezbollah north of the Litani river - then perhaps you
| would understand that this is likely as close as you can
| get to a "precision strike" on an enemy you're at war with.
|
| This may in-fact be the most precise military strike on an
| enemy paramilitary group in the history of modern warfare.
|
| You either have a very unrealistic idea of what a war
| actually looks like (0% civilians casualties or injuries),
| or an agenda.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Let's just say, I don't believe war is a cover for
| terrorism against any peoples, be it in the West or East,
| Arab or Caucasian.
| csmpltn wrote:
| Fair enough, and thanks for being open about this. With
| this in mind, all I can say is that your original comment
| is based on 100% emotion and 0% analysis and rationality.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Do you think that any military action with civilian
| impact constitutes terrorism?
|
| no war has ever been waged without collateral damage.
| knodi123 wrote:
| war waged without collateral damage:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War
| shihab wrote:
| do you realize that nurses in hospital, civil servants
| workers are among people carrying this device? That not
| all, not even majority of Hizbollah personnel have no
| military responsibility whatsoever?
| csmpltn wrote:
| There's absolutely no reason for uninvolved, random and
| peaceful civilians to be carrying a classified wartime-
| ready pager issued by a paramilitary terrorist
| organization. If you were carrying the device you're
| either Hezbollah, or cooperating with them - which makes
| you a legitimate military target.
|
| Israel has given Lebanon and Hezbollah enough ultimatums
| to stop the aggressions. This is what happens when
| diplomacy fails.
| koolba wrote:
| > If you were carrying the device you're either
| Hezbollah, or cooperating with them - which makes you a
| legitimate military target.
|
| Or you were standing in line next to a guy holding one
| while waiting to buy groceries. It's clearly
| indiscriminate to the collateral damage.
| csmpltn wrote:
| But we already have videos of people standing in very
| close proximity to the devices being detonated - and not
| getting hurt. In-fact, many of the people carrying the
| device in their pockets ended up not sustaining life-
| threatening injuries.
|
| I'm not saying civilians weren't hurt by this. But I'm
| also saying that no war has 0% civilian casualties. Those
| two countries are at war with each other.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| If they were truly indiscriminate and and indifferent to
| collateral damage, there are far easier and more
| effective ways to kill a few dozen people in Lebanon.
|
| The whole complex and contrived attack speaks of tying to
| minimize collateral damage.
| eastbound wrote:
| I like your lack of proportions.
|
| This war is about Hezbollah and Hamas shelling civilians
| in Israel. Like hundreds of rockets per night. If, to
| stop that, it may harm a few civilians who are waiting
| next to Hezbollah members,
|
| ...you would let people keep shelling civilians by
| hundreds and hundreds of rockets?
|
| How do you choose your actions, do you always support the
| guys who cause the maximum deaths? How does it work,
| "indiscriminate damage" is as soon as a person is
| inconvenienced while they were holding Hezbollah's
| grocery bags? Shouldn't they ... distance themselves?
|
| Pun unintended. But it's a very good question. Shouldn't
| they distance themselves from active murderers?
| beaglesss wrote:
| This won't do anything meaningful to reduce civilian
| deaths. Less than 0.1% of Lebanon injured, and 10x that
| number now even more enraged. Not meaningfully repeatable
| either, won't create significant attrition
|
| Stoking the flames of death is all.
| csmpltn wrote:
| This sends a message to Hezbollah and Lebanon. "Last
| chance to turn around". After 12 months of back-and-
| forth, and all attempts at diplomacy failing.
|
| Beirut can end up just like Gaza, but Israel has been
| restraining itself. Not for much longer.
| tmnvix wrote:
| > Israel has been restraining itself. Not for much
| longer.
|
| If this is what a restrained Israel looks like, the god
| help us all.
| koolba wrote:
| > ...you would let people keep shelling civilians by
| hundreds and hundreds of rockets?
|
| I said no such thing though do find it interesting that
| any questioning of the methods used by one party is
| interpreted as blanket acceptance of all methods used by
| the other.
|
| > Pun unintended. But it's a very good question.
| Shouldn't they distance themselves from active murderers?
|
| How could they possibly know? I've never been in line for
| a sandwich and thought to ask if the person in front of
| me might spontaneously explode.
| jajko wrote:
| Terrorism definition is independent of whether there is
| ongoing war or not, lets not divert the subject with
| simple whataboutism.
|
| We all know what happened, on both sides, including
| deaths of tens of thousands of civilians including
| thousands of palestinian children who did fuck nothing to
| anybody, just were born at bad place at bad time.
|
| What would be enough kill ratio israeli : palestinian
| civilian, or even better israeli civilian : palestinian
| kid/baby that would satiate Israeli government to stop
| the war? _Very_ conservative estimates put deaths of
| direct US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to around
| 500k, meaning its 500:3 ratio and factual defeat of US
| army to withdraw and cut losses. So thats the threshold
| of civilized western world? Israel already surpassed that
| long time ago.
|
| They can't and won't win with Hamas and they know it, its
| exactly same situation as Taliban, ISIS etc. Regroup,
| strike back, stronger, smarter, better equipped, more
| motivated. Spiral of death can go on and on till there is
| nobody standing on neither side.
|
| If I had to choose where the next nuclear detonation
| happens it would be for me 50:50 Ukraine : Israel, and
| this is how you get there.
| csmpltn wrote:
| The only person bringing in "whataboutism" into this
| conversation so-far is you.
|
| We're talking about a specific event taking place in
| Lebanon today, why are you bringing in the Palestinians
| into this?
|
| Hezbollah has willingly involved itself in this conflict,
| and the Lebanese government is complicit in not doing
| anything to stop them (how convenient). The same thing
| applies to the UN peacekeeping forces, which have failed
| to uphold UN resolution 1701. Many attempts were made
| over the past 12 months to reach a settlement with
| Hezbollah and Lebanon through various channels, to no
| avail.
|
| The targets of this specific event were members of
| Hezbollah carrying a Hezbollah-issued communications
| device. End of story.
| captainkrtek wrote:
| The unfortunate thing is that regardless of politics,
| this will be seen as further escalation that ratchets up
| the risk of greater regional conflict. All wars
| eventually end, its just a question of how long, and how
| much death (both militarily and civilian) will be endured
| by everyone in the region. I hope there are diplomatic
| possibilities to de-escalate, but it seems those windows
| are closing.
| ericmcer wrote:
| Violence has been probably the biggest driver of innovation
| for us as a species. I would categorize thousands of
| weapons as "cool" viewed dispassionately. Aircraft
| carriers, Fighter Jets, Cruise missiles. They are all
| definitely cool when viewed from afar.
| barbs wrote:
| Both things can be true
| ridiculous_leke wrote:
| By that reasoning even Churchill is a terrorist.
| cassepipe wrote:
| Which they would probably agree to. Purists do not care
| for practical matters such arbitrating what would be the
| best course of action in order to have the less
| casualties because for them the only acceptable number of
| casualties is _zero_ because any war and casualty is
| _immoral_.
|
| I have sympathy for this kind of reasoning because it's
| been mine for a long time. There is something important
| for the preservation of the self in refusing all kinds of
| wrong in the world. The problem is that by refusing to
| engage with the world, they can affect nothing (and
| probably accept that, everybody should just stop being
| immoral, that's easy in their mind)
| Arubis wrote:
| If you include his treatment of subjects of the British
| Raj, there's plenty of folks that will agree with that
| labeling.
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| I have no doubt that innocent civilians have been injured.
| But it's also worth noting that there are thousands of
| Hezbollah members, so the number alone doesn't necessarily
| tell us much about the number of civilians injured. (Similar
| to the casualty figures that come out of Gaza.)
|
| I hate the idea of _any_ innocent civilian being injured. But
| it might also be instructive to consider the alternative: if
| Israel wanted to achieve similar results via a conventional
| war against Hezbollah, it seems virtually guaranteed that far
| more innocent people would have been injured and killed--not
| to mention the Israeli civilians on the other side, whose
| lives also matter.
| random_upvoter wrote:
| > if Israel wanted to achieve similar results via a
| conventional war against Hezbollah, it seems virtually
| guaranteed that far more innocent people would have been
| injured and killed
|
| "It's OK that Israel causes excessive amounts of civilian
| casualties, because in the alternative scenario Israel
| would also cause excessive amounts of civilian casualties"
| dmitrygr wrote:
| [flagged]
| snapcaster wrote:
| "Its war on terrorists" sure. by framing what's happening
| in that way you've already excused away most of the
| things people are upset about
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| I agree that the framing is tendentious (though not
| necessarily false). But I don't think much actually
| hinges on that. The point is still worth considering even
| if it's just a "war" rather than "war on terrorists." The
| linked article is a study on wars in general, not just
| wars "on terror."
| dmitrygr wrote:
| > "Its war on terrorists" sure. by framing what's
| happening in that way
|
| Out of curiosity, do you: (1) not think that there is a
| war between Hezbollah and Israel [0][1, (2) not think
| that Hezbollah (an internationally recognized terror
| group[2]) is a terror group, or (3) not think that a war
| with terrorists is thus a "war on terrorists"?
|
| [0] https://www.france24.com/en/middle-
| east/20240908-hezbollah-f...
|
| [1] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/dozens-
| hezbollah-m...
|
| [2] https://www.dni.gov/nctc/ftos/lebanese_hizballah_fto.
| html#:~....
| squigz wrote:
| I doubt that's what GP meant, and I don't think one has
| to think either of those things to not buy into the "war
| on terrorism" rhetoric that is used to excuse all sorts
| of atrocities.
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| I don't find it very persuasive to simply _assume_ that
| the casualties are "excessive." Whether they are
| actually excessive is really the whole issue. As of right
| now, there is no strong evidence that I'm aware of that
| the injuries from today's attack are "excessive" much
| less those of a different purely hypothetical attack.
|
| And even then: to judge whether casualties are excessive
| requires an understanding of the goal to be achieved,
| which is almost completely absent from this discussion.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Why isn't it better to cause fewer civilian casualties
| &/or those of lesser severity than a shooting fight or
| missile attack?[1] Given the situation has already
| degenerated to its current state where fighting is the
| status quo and all options lead to innocent casualties
| then minimizing those is the horrible "OK" option. Not
| okay in the sense of desirable, not okay in the sense
| that things should never have degenerate to this level to
| begin with, only okay as the less horrible option.
|
| [1] Videos show the explosions highly limited in their
| ability to cause injuries as bad as a bullet to anyone
| ever a foot or two away from the explosions, much less
| than I would expect from anything more conventional.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| >You've just injured and identified most of your enemies,
| incapacitated them, completely broken their communication
| network and effectively given you weeks of disarray to do
| whatever you want to further disrupt them.
|
| And affected their recruitment. Because of how pagers are worn,
| a significant number of injuries are going to be genital
| injuries.
|
| Given, that your primary recruits are young men, that is
| important.
|
| In that demographic, the young men may actually fear non-lethal
| genital injuries more than they actually fear death.
| jnmandal wrote:
| > 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.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| 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.
| nashashmi wrote:
| I dont think you have to hand it to them. I just think that
| they have to know who the people are. And a code has to be
| uploaded to the pagers that cause the explosion.
|
| There have been several presentations on this before. It was
| for old cell phones.
| bigtoe416 wrote:
| The shell company isn't a strict requirement, and I'd wager
| less likely. Infiltrating the delivery process would be easier
| and would instead require knowing about the pager purchase and
| being able to swap the actual package for an alternative
| package. Theoretically all of this is possible with some data
| interception to discover the pager order, a team to construct
| the exploding pagers, a person to deliver the exploding pagers,
| and a person to intercept the actual pagers (which could be the
| same person delivering the exploding pagers).
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Rumor that this is the company that manufactures the pagers:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Apollo
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Title really should say "pagers", not "devices".
| meindnoch wrote:
| Reminds me of two things:
|
| 1. Mossad killed the chief bombmaker of Hamas with an exploding
| phone in 1996: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash
|
| 2. My grandma used to say not to wear my phone on me, especially
| close to my heart or my balls, because she thought it was
| dangerous somehow. Turns out she was right!
| moussasissoko wrote:
| Yahya Ayyash was a bombmaker for Hamas, not Hezbollah.
| meindnoch wrote:
| True. Mea culpa!
| m3kw9 wrote:
| A gram of c4 will do it?
| Sam6late wrote:
| At the cashier, one video clip shows a guy paying then he looks
| at the massage that beeped his Appolo pager, then it exploded,
| this trigger message is supported further with first responders'
| statements on large numbers of those treated for impact on eyes.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| It reminds me of the movie Law Abiding Citizen.
|
| Check it out if you haven't already:
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1197624/
| maratumba wrote:
| Gives the term "remote code execution" a new meaning.
| bawolff wrote:
| Cant help but be reminded of that james mickens article about the
| mossad vs not mossad threat model
| https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf where
| he joking says that mossad will replace your cellphone with a
| blick of uranium (as a joke to imply you shouldnt worry about
| nation state actor type threats when building a stupid web app
| that nobody cares about, because its impossible)
| dzonga wrote:
| one of the best things I have read this week. thanks
| bawolff wrote:
| If you like that, i highly reccomend his talk on ai risks.
| https://youtu.be/ajGX7odA87k?si=-NMySaJzBdx5wlf2 . Half
| serious talk half stand up commedy routine.
| fredgrott wrote:
| Part of the context is that they use a different communication
| network which is probably why they were targeted in that specific
| way...
|
| Overcharging batteries would be the hack....not suggesting
| someone do this but said strategy works with both acid based and
| lithium batteries...
| dagaci wrote:
| J*sus. I fully plan to stop going around with my iphone
| everywhere (until this is fully explained). We could all be 1
| glitch (think CrowdStrike) away from getting lithium exploded
| mysteriously.
| ein0p wrote:
| Nuisance terror attack, nothing more. Completely ineffective and
| will have a rather severe blowback. Whoever came up with this
| didn't think it through.
| mrkeen wrote:
| Maybe? Piss Lebanon off to engage in a public fight, and then
| defend yourself on the US's dime until you occupy their land.
| ein0p wrote:
| I don't think the "US dime" will be coming as lavishly
| irrespective of the composition and allegiances of the Biden
| admin. This is a major election issue, and Harris is wobbly
| even without this.
| i2km wrote:
| So, if the method was to substitute the batteries for ones
| containing explosives, then how were they triggered
| simultaneously?
|
| Wouldn't this also require some additional HW/SW in the pagers to
| trigger the devices? Otherwise, if it was just battery terminals
| connecting to the battery, how would a remote signal trigger
| them?
|
| Or maybe it's as simple as the adulterated batteries containing
| timers and thus not needing external triggering?
| mzs wrote:
| timer?
| gojomo wrote:
| And you thought "Key Escrow" or "Chat Control" was bad!
|
| Future maximum-security states may just require _every_ mobile
| phone to have an explosive charge pre-installed, with the
| detonation-codes only available to the authorities, of course.
|
| Then when they detect a device in active use by a
| [terrorist|child-pornographer|subversive|tax-evader], ka-blewie!
| Problem solved at the press of a button.
|
| See also: 'Black Mirror' s3e6, 'Hated in the Nation'
| guerrilla wrote:
| I have a better idea. Every politician has a bomb collar tied
| to their approval rating. ;)
| lvl155 wrote:
| We live in a world where iPhones get shipped directly from China.
| I know this is pretty much conspiratorial but if China wanted to
| hack a bunch of iPhones in the hands of government officials,
| there's nothing to stop them. This episode made me realize how
| loose security is around supply chains.
| campuscodi wrote:
| Looks like a hardware supply chain attack:
| https://goachronicle.com/hezbollah-members-pagers-exploded-i...
|
| >>GoaChronicle through its intelligence network has learned that
| Israeli intelligence successfully intercepted a shipment of pager
| batteries that had been ordered from B&H Photo. The order was
| placed from Lebanon. Acting on a confirmed tip, the intelligence
| agency seized the shipment and covertly modified the batteries.
| Small, undetectable explosives known as Kiska 3 were inserted
| into the battery casings and connected to the battery wires via a
| discreet chip. The pager model was Rugged Pager AR924 IP67. The
| operation code word was 'Below the Belt'.
| alecco wrote:
| This sounds very likely.
| tootie wrote:
| B&H?!?! The giant store in Manhattan famously run by Orthodox
| Jews? If that's confirmed it's going to be protested into dust
| pretty soon.
|
| EDIT: I see an addenda to the article that B&H are denying any
| involvement. We'll see how it plays out. True or not, the rumor
| will be flying.
| tzs wrote:
| If it is confirmed I'd expect it to actually boost B&H's
| business, as long as B&H didn't actually know of or
| participate in the tampering with the shipment.
|
| As you note B&H is well known for being run by Orthodox Jews.
| So why the heck would Hezbollah, an organization that wants
| to destroy Israel, buy their batteries from B&H?
|
| It suggests that B&H is a really great place to buy things,
| so much better than the alternatives that even if dealing
| with Jews goes against your fundamental beliefs it is worth
| it.
| bewaretheirs wrote:
| > B&H Photo
|
| Okay, that pretty much guarantees that somebody at the Goa
| Chronicle fell hook, line, and sinker for a bit of internet
| satire.
|
| EDIT:
|
| It would also appear that the good folks at the Goa Chronicle
| failed to check a Yiddish-English dictionary.
| astrange wrote:
| Isn't that a joke? I don't think Hezbollah orders from B&H.
| wg0 wrote:
| Do we really know that these were explosives or lithium ion
| batteries on their own can be this dangerous?
| switch007 wrote:
| The title is egregiously bad
| davedx wrote:
| I am leaving HN if this is what I'll encounter when visiting.
| doomroot wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| Please don't do this here.
| throw16180339 wrote:
| It isn't normally like this unless the topic is controversial.
| tharne wrote:
| If you don't like a particular post or the comments on it, just
| don't read it. Sheesh, no need for the melodrama. Plenty of
| other great articles and posts on here.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| What is HN's reason for not allowing submissions to be
| downvoted? Downvote seems like the most appropriate solution.
| system2 wrote:
| "Israel managed to hack the portable pagers and cause them to
| explode" sounds like they uploaded firmware to make the device
| explode. In fact, it was a supply chain infiltration and they
| modified the devices with explosives inside. It's weird to call
| it hack.
| briandw wrote:
| Let's assume that the battery in the pager is replaced with half
| C4 half battery. AA battery weighs about 20-25g, so 12.5g C4
| total. 12.5g of C4 has roughly 84,000J of energy. For comparison,
| a 62 grain 5.56 NATO round has about 1,700 J of kinetic energy.
| The C4 is undirected, so the target is getting a fraction of the
| impact, but that much C4 detonating near your body is going to do
| some serious damage.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| A question for more knowledgeable users: What CPU does Apollo
| AP-900 Pager use? I tried to search the Internet but found
| nothing.
| kazinator wrote:
| How do you go from "dozens" in the headline to "several" in the
| opening paragraph, while respecting yourself as journalistic
| writer?
| nirav72 wrote:
| Certainly lot cheaper than a missile or two.
| passion__desire wrote:
| Mossad said - "Explain to me why it is more noble to kill
| 10,000 men in battle than a dozen at dinner."
| christkv wrote:
| Ok so they have incapacitated a large swath of the organisations
| leadership. Are they planning to roll in now ?
| golergka wrote:
| Hopefully.
| chgs wrote:
| If this can happen then there no way the TSA and other groups
| would be able to detect it.
| SuperManifolds wrote:
| The Times of Israel, seriously? Could you have picked a more
| biased source?
| mrvenkman wrote:
| Nothing in that particular report says anything about the pagers
| exploding individually. It may of been a box, labelled as
| containing pagers, delivered to a group of people and detonated
| in one location.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| There are videos on twitter and NY Times article explains more
|
| Pagers people had on their pants exploded
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Amazingly enough, the concept of hacking personal communications
| devices to explode was explored recently in the "phone strike"
| scene in _Jackpot!_ , an Amazon MGM Studios movie released a
| month ago.
|
| https://x.com/obdmpod/status/1836087414290284588
| paxys wrote:
| And Kingsman: The Secret Service from 2014.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Weren't those surgical implants, though? A bit different, not
| an innocuous everyday gadget turned deadly. More of a Laputan
| Machine.
| eigenspace wrote:
| This is nothing new. Israel has done attacks like this since
| the 60s.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| They've remotely triggered multiple consumer devices
| simultaneously?
| misiti3780 wrote:
| here is how they did it (supposedly):
|
| https://x.com/Osint613/status/1836111109742354507
| Hermandw wrote:
| Amir Tsarfati on Telegram: The updated numbers:
|
| 4000 wounded of which 400 in critical conditions
|
| Al Jazeera from a Lebanese security source:
|
| The pagers were brought to Lebanon 5 months ago. They were
| boobytrapped in advance. Each device contained an explosive
| weighing no more than 20 grams.
| AustinDev wrote:
| 20 grams that's wild. You could only produce these kinds of
| effects from a 'military grade' explosive like CL-20 or
| similar.
| beezle wrote:
| per a calculator on unsaferguard.org 20g of RDX
|
| Injury/Fatality to Personnel Range (m) Fatal Distance 0.64
| Lung Damage 1.02 Eardrum Rupture 2.63
| Eduard wrote:
| So apparently, it must be less than 20 g of RDX, and/or a
| weaker explosive: if the fatal distance was within 0.64
| meters, there would be significantly more reported deaths.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Or: lower-abdominal proximity has lower lethality.
|
| That charge, held to the ear, would have had a
| considerably stronger effect.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Distance in meters?
|
| NB: add two spaces before text for "code" formatting, or
| two linebreaks between lines.
| Injury/Fatality to Personnel Range (m) Fatal Distance
| 0.64 Lung Damage 1.02 Eardrum Rupture 2.63
|
| (I'd found your comment in an Algolia search result which
| shows your original linebreak as entered.)
| chemeril wrote:
| 20 grams of C4 or similar plastic explosive would be more
| than adequate to produce the effects seen. CL-20 wouldn't be
| a good choice for this deployment: it's not particularly
| stable for rough handling even with a good phlegmatizing
| blend, and tends to decompose at the temps one would expect a
| pager to be exposed to (hot car, etc).
| AustinDev wrote:
| That's a fair point my knowledge of explosive chemicals
| only stems from conventional missile-based warheads and
| propellants. It's very possible a different explosive was
| used.
| beezle wrote:
| And given where pagers are typically kept, future pro-creation
| of many wounded will be in doubt.
| Sakos wrote:
| Who exactly is Amir Tsarfati and why is this a trusted source
| for numbers? I can't find anything reliable about him by search
| engine.
| feedforward wrote:
| In addition to their on-going genocide in Gaza, the Zionists are
| attacking the West Bank, Yemen, Syria, Iran and Lebanon. How many
| countries are these colonialist who "made aliyah" going to start
| wars with?
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| 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 streets, they are doing
| many things to provoke another conflict/war. I think if they fail
| to keep Israel in a war-like state, his days will be over
| quickly. He knows that, so he tries to escalate. Not that Iran
| and their allies aren't provoking and escalating either, but for
| Netanyahu this is all very convenient.
| tptacek wrote:
| The opposite is probably more true. By the admission of some of
| Netanyahu's own command staff, the only reason the IDF is still
| committed in Gaza is to keep Netanyahu in power; as soon as
| Gaza is resolved, he's likely to be ousted (and then to face
| criminal charges). Israel cannot stay fully engaged in Gaza and
| open up a conventional military front in southern Lebanon. If
| we're using this kind of logic --- message board logic, let's
| be clear --- today's action harms Netanyahu's immediate
| interests, by hastening the point at which the IDF will
| substantially withdraw from Gaza.
| underdeserver wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that if the IDF is committed in Lebanon it's
| no different from Gaza, as far as the ousting process is
| concerned.
|
| Do you have a source for that command staff admission?
|
| There are still hostages in Gaza. Until they're either
| released or proven dead I would guess Gaza would still be
| counted as "unresolved".
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Why do you think Israel has the military and manpower to
| pursue both in parallel?
|
| They have already called up 75% of their reservists for
| Gaza, and war with Lebanon would be a huge demand on
| resources.
| underdeserver wrote:
| It's not a binary choice. Israel could keep some forces
| in Gaza - a much smaller force than what was used in the
| first few months of the ground campaign - and focus the
| majority of forces in Lebanon.
|
| I don't see force readiness reports. I hope Israeli
| officials do, and make the right decisions.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| The parent post said "Israel cannot stay fully engaged in
| Gaza and open up a conventional military front in
| southern Lebanon."
|
| Of course they would have more resources if they largely
| pulled out of Gaza or froze efforts there. As I read it,
| the point was that they cant go to war with Lebanon
| without changing the approach to Gaza, which is the short
| term political priority.
| spacephysics wrote:
| Like George Carlin said, "you don't need a formal conspiracy
| when interests converge"
|
| There are other governments who also benefit from war in the
| region that most likely have a hand in encouraging, directly or
| indirectly, for continued conflict.
| passion__desire wrote:
| 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?
| shmatt wrote:
| Unfortunately Netanyahu has gained and lost the prime minister
| position multiple times without wars. He's just somewhat
| popular. Between his first government in 1995 and today, people
| forget there were prime ministers Sharon, Olmert, Barak, Lapid,
| Bennet, just 18 months before 10/07 his opposition was in
| power. Did they not have any part of ignoring the preperations?
|
| Even if he would have lost his position if 10/07 never
| happened, history has shown he always ends up back in
| leadership due to a million+ voters for his own party, and
| millions of votes for other religious and right wing parties.
|
| People can rightfully hate them all they want, but he has the
| votes, and Israel doesn't have a limit on the number of times
| you can be prime minister
|
| This is only half joking but the only "solution" to the
| Netanyahu problem is to replace the voters
| CydeWeys wrote:
| You're forgetting that tens of thousands of Israelis from the
| north of Israel have been homeless and internally displaced
| since shortly after October 7th when Hezbollah started
| indiscriminately targeting Israeli residential neighborhoods in
| North Israel with rockets, artillery, and ATGMs, killing
| several civilians. This is not a tenable state of affairs, not
| militarily, nor politically. Israel is going to address it one
| way or another, one day or another, and perhaps they're
| starting now.
|
| So in one sense you're right that it's to keep their population
| at bay -- because their population is absolutely fed up with
| the situation in North Israel and how people have been homeless
| for nearly a year now and a huge swath of the northern part of
| the country, will billions of dollars in real estate in total,
| is uninhabitable. And if this government can't provide security
| for its citizens, which is the most important thing a
| government can do by the way, then it will be replaced with one
| that can.
| abdellah123 wrote:
| Thousands now were injured. This is a massive scale (terrorist)
| attack
| ksaj wrote:
| The reason you are asked to prove your laptop can boot at airport
| security is that batteries and bombs have similar densities.
|
| It would be pretty straight forward to rig a pager to run off of
| one battery while the other is an explosive charge made to look
| like the actual battery.
| devit wrote:
| I wonder why they did this, thus revealing that they compromised
| a lot of devices and losing that capability, instead of quietly
| continuing to monitor them and using their location to perform
| attacks via other means if needed.
|
| Maybe they hope the psychological effect is a big deterrent?
| dangerboysteve wrote:
| Don't pagers just used AA or AAA batteries ?
| mef51 wrote:
| This is a new flavour of mass terrorism. Israel simultaneously
| and indiscriminately detonated thousands of devices across
| Lebanon. Explosions went off in grocery stores, in homes, in
| cars, and on the streets. Hospitals are overwhelmed with the at
| least 2700+ injured and are asking for blood donations. A child
| and 8 other people have been reported killed so far.
|
| What do you think happens next if the world acts like these kinds
| of attacks are acceptable? Or worse, "interesting"?
| yreg wrote:
| This comment got posted twice.
| danielodievich wrote:
| 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 escape. The movie
| is R rated but obviously it's hollywood so instead of blown off
| fingers and holes in ribs that we see in Lebanon, its just
| someone's crotch is aflame, that's about it. But it was the first
| thing that jumped to me when I heard about it. Go hollywood!
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| 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
| vander_elst wrote:
| From a legal perspective, are there any regulations on these
| kinds of attacks? Meaning, are they allowed? Are they considered
| a war crime or maybe this is still a gray area?
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| If you get over the technical aspect of it it's just
| straightforward terrorism. These would go off in public, in
| people's homes, in grocery stores, hospitals and restaurants,
| just anywhere the pager carriers happen to be at the time.
| oytis wrote:
| It's not that there is a list of approved ways to attack your
| enemy. Inventing new ways to take enemy by surprise is
| absolutely a part of warfare. What's important from legal
| perspective is the ratio between military effect and collateral
| damage. In this case so far it seems it was better than if
| conventional warfare was used.
| worik wrote:
| Breaks my heart to see high tech used to create mayhem rather
| than improve the world
| interestica wrote:
| Are pagers allowed on airplanes? Most modern digital devices also
| carry a sealed Lithium ion pack....
| ajb wrote:
| Tangentially related - Hezbollah used pagers because they could
| not trust mobiles. One reason is that mobile basebands are locked
| down: if they weren't, it's quite possible that by now someone
| would have implemented a baseband firmware which preserves opsec,
| that could be used on (rooted) phones . That is probably one of
| the reasons why governments are hostile to modifiable radio
| firmware.
| ummonk wrote:
| Looking at pictures of mangled devices, it would seem to confirm
| that they were Motorola Gold Apollo pagers. In which case they
| just used standard alkaline batteries which would rule out a
| malware targeting the battery, and confirm it was a supply chain
| attack with planted explosives.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Lebanon_pager_explosions
| JSDevOps wrote:
| I find it hard to believe that people are seriously considering
| the cybersecurity angle in this situation. Yes, there may be some
| extremely rare and unlikely scenarios where you could hack into a
| device and cause the attached lithium-ion battery to overheat and
| combust. However, it's important to understand that lithium-ion
| batteries don't actually explode--they combust gradually over the
| span of a few seconds to minutes. Even if they did explode, which
| they don't, we're talking about something with the energy
| equivalent of a single AAA battery, not a large and powerful EV
| cell. Given these facts, it's far more plausible that those
| pagers were intercepted and deliberately implanted with
| explosives, rather than being manipulated through hacking.
| ilikeitdark wrote:
| 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.
| talldayo wrote:
| It's not easy. Lithium-ion batteries are designed to withstand
| heat without presenting an immediate or non-obvious threat to
| the user. The easiest way to cause a pyrotechnic discharge is
| to penetrate the battery itself, and even that isn't terribly
| explosive (here's a laptop battery "exploding":
| https://youtu.be/oieH2wwDGzo )
|
| If someone did try heating up your phone to implement such an
| attack, you would feel it burning through your denim pockets
| long before it hits 210f. Futhermore, both phone SOCs and
| battery firmwares tend to implement emergency shutoff
| contingencies for when the phone overheats. Without prior
| tampering, nothing will really behave like it does in this
| attack. It is 100% a supply-chain threat.
| moffkalast wrote:
| I seriously doubt there is any way at all for software to
| trigger a dead short, and even if you did, the path would burn
| out quickly and the hardware only BMS part would cut power due
| to the massive voltage drop.
| cebu_blue wrote:
| OK you just have to prevent it on OS level tbab. So the battery
| temperature doesn't go higher than a certain level.
| ridgeguy wrote:
| These were detonations, not batteries gone wild. A few grams of
| common explosives like PETN could have been dabbed to look like a
| small component in a pager. An exploding bridge wire (EBW)
| detonator can be blown by a charge pumped array of small low
| voltage capacitors charged in parallel, then switched to
| discharge in series. No booster needed.
| ckemere wrote:
| The expected collateral damage here seems severe even for Israel.
| It makes me wonder if there was a coding error where a subset of
| the devices were _supposed_ to explode but they all did by
| mistake...
| runjake wrote:
| I haven't seen images of the damage, but the difference in damage
| between an exploding lithium ion battery and 10-15 grams of RDX
| explosives is going to be "night and day", as they say.
|
| Edit: OK, I've seen some videos. Looks like much less than 10-15g
| of RDX levels of explosions.
| tmnvix wrote:
| Aside from the death and injury, what concerns me about this is
| why now?
|
| There is little doubt in my mind that the Prime Minister of
| Israel is highly motivated to engage in a wider war and drag the
| US along.
|
| This mass bombing could well be in preparation for imminent
| further action - such as an invasion of Lebanon. Regardless, the
| escalation this represents is extremely concerning.
| nntwozz wrote:
| What a dystopian time to be alive.
|
| Next thing we got Teslas driving off a cliff or AirPods exploding
| in peoples ears.
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