82 ms·
Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon
- tptacek 2y agoWell, James Mickens sure called this one.
- jgrahamc 2y agoCould you explain for the uninitiated?
- tptacek 2y agohttps://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf
- gromgull 2y agothis is the funniest thing I've read in a long time. Everyone should go read it now!
- amonon 2y agoThe 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 https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens Here's my favorite: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thenightwatch.pdf https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thenightwatc...
- arminiusreturns 2y ago[flagged]
- pbronez 2y ago""" 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:// 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 2y agoAh yes, the Mossad / Non Mossad threat model :). Classic.
- dadrian 2y agoNah, 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?
- dangerboysteve 2y agoDon't pagers just used AA or AAA batteries ?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- yamrzou 2y agoWhy 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 2y ago> 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 2y ago98% 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 2y ago"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.
- elorant 2y ago[flagged]
- nhggfu 2y agoany indication which brand(s) of pagers were in use?
- anonss 2y agoThe latest versions just exploded; not sure about the brands though
- oldgradstudent 2y agoI saw a speculation on r/lebanon: https://www.gapollo.com.tw/rugged-pager-ar924/ 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.gapollo.com.tw/rugged-pager-ar924/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240529091558/https://www.gapol...
- tamimio 2y agoIt does look like this one, the page doesn’t open so J assume it’s the page.
- dredmorbius 2y ago[flagged]
- TiredOfLife 2y agoThe ones that had explosives put into them.
- minkles 2y ago[flagged]
- mandmandam 2y ago[flagged]
- bbqfog 2y ago[flagged]
- myth_drannon 2y ago[flagged]
- bbqfog 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bell-cot 2y agoObvious #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"?
- golergka 2y ago[flagged]
- HarryHirsch 2y agoThis hack is the best argument against network-connected electric vehicles that there is. Imagine the same, but with tens of thousands of Teslas.
- mandmandam 2y agoNot to mention phones, laptops, tables, smart watches, medical devices, children's toys, etc.
- lm28469 2y agoThat'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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KR7_xwQbYp0 That's a bomb: https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1836037485492629605 https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1836037485492629605
- LinuxBender 2y agoI 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZVYTJarPFs [video][2 mins]
- Log_out_ 2y agoNot one backdoor? not even for the blues?
- 2y ago
- diggan 2y agoNot 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-members-wounded-lebanon-when-pagers-exploded-sources-witnesses-2024-09-17/ https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/dozens-hezbollah-m...
- mytailorisrich 2y agoWhat'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)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- __alexs 2y agoIt's not especially novel, it's just a lot of similar weapons systems (e.g. cluster bombs, anti personnel landmines) are banned these days.
- jazzyjackson 2y ago[flagged]
- fra 2y agoThis may be the first widely reported deadly hack of a connected device. Wild times we live in.
- upcoming-sesame 2y agohttps://x.com/WachtelDan/status/1836038754756145515 https://x.com/WachtelDan/status/1836038754756145515 Footage from the hospital
- bluefishinit 2y ago[flagged]
- bbqfog 2y ago[flagged]
- HeadlessChild 2y agoThat is some wild and scary stuff.
- algo_trader 2y ago> 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-operatives-pagers-explode-in-apparent-attack-across-lebanon-cf31cad4 https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/hundreds-of-hezbollah-...
- myponybaloney 2y ago[dead]
- lbeltrame 2y agoQuestion for those with more knowledge on these devices: how can they detonate? The batteries?
- gomezjdaniel 2y agoIt could be they had a way to warm up the batteries until these explode
- mapt 2y agoThe 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 2y agoIt seems like they actually installed small bombs in the devices.
- tiagod 2y agoHow is it so clear to you?
- mapt 2y agoI was discounting the possibility that Mossad was in control of global supplychains with sufficient intensity and recklessness to hide semtex and a detonator in an entire brand of consumer electronics, in its urgency to provide retroactive justification for every antisemitic conspiracy theory out there and ignite war with the entire Middle East. The only thing in a pager that SHOULD BE THERE with enough energy to 'explode' on demand, is a lithium ion battery. Which is evidently, given further reports, not what happened here.
- danbruc 2y agoThis 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-simultaneously-explode-across-lebanon-casualties-in-the-hundreds/ https://realrepublic.com/encrypted-hezbollah-pagers-simultan...
- bbqfog 2y ago[flagged]
- h2odragon 2y agohttps://archive.ph/l6dpE https://archive.ph/l6dpE one video: https://x.com/Breaking911/status/1836039436653519209 https://x.com/Breaking911/status/1836039436653519209
- o999 2y agoPrimary news suggests its an Israeli cyberattack
- Haskell4life 2y ago[dead]
- bhouston 2y agoCyberattack or supply chain attack? Who uses pagers? So a supply chain attack could have been the cause.
- vpol 2y agocould be both
- piva00 2y agoI 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 2y agoIs 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 2y agoIt 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-operatives-pagers-explode-in-apparent-attack-across-lebanon-cf31cad4 https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/hundreds-of-hezbollah-...
- anonss 2y agoIt was surprising tbh. Someone said on the news that they tried to control the short circuit and increase the voltage which made batteries explode??
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- netsharc 2y agoIt 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(); }
- myth_drannon 2y ago[flagged]
- honzaik 2y agoIt may be a combination of making the battery overheat which would trigger the planted explosives from a supply chain attack. Of course, I am no hardware engineer/bomb expert to know if that is possible.
- flutas 2y agoI 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 2y agoMost 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
- Circlecrypto2 2y agoI'd love a technical write up on how this is possible. Is it RF based or the battery being exploited?
- bluescrn 2y ago"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 2y agoIsrael 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 2y agoHow is this possible? Are they overclocking the MPUs and just heating the batteries to the point of explosion?
- scandox 2y agoSurely just supply chain infiltration and regular explosives no?
- scttwk 2y agoAgreed, the story mentions that the exploded models were all the latest ones purchased in recent months
- lsllc 2y agoWouldn't this be too easy to detect -- for example tripping airport security (or other X-ray security systems, govt. buildings etc).
- kayodelycaon 2y agoI think a state actor would be able to make an explosive look like a battery on x-ray.
- scandox 2y agoWell if you have personnel who regularly carry weapons and/or explosives maybe those checks don't apply...but anyway this is mere speculation.
- bluescrn 2y agoThese 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 2y agoCan you share a link to the Twitter post? If it's graphic, please mention so.
- matltc 2y agoGuessing 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 2y agoThat'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 2y agoMore 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 2y agoCould 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 2y agoMaybe 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 2y agoThey 100% had a explosive added inside. Batteries cannot explode like that.
- diggan 2y agoAssuming 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 2y agoYes, but compare a phone's much larger lithium battery exploding: https://youtu.be/8nz5ijXcckI?si=jpZOWIs3BIQTvVt2&t=31 https://youtu.be/8nz5ijXcckI?si=jpZOWIs3BIQTvVt2&t=31 With a Hezbollah pager exploding: https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1836037485492629605 https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1836037485492629605
- tamimio 2y agoThanks for the videos, obviously something extra was added.
- viraptor 2y agoNot really. This is about the worst your can do with a lithium battery in practice https://youtu.be/oieH2wwDGzo 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.
- aerodog 2y ago[flagged]
- ajsnigrutin 2y agoThis 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 2y agoAnother 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_pager_blowing_up_caught_on_surveillance/ https://www.reddit.com/r/lebanon/comments/1fizgag/ha_member_...
- ajsnigrutin 2y agoNah, 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.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago[flagged]
- ajsnigrutin 2y agoTerrorist is relative... my country was liberated from the nazis by what would then be called "terrorists". For many people down there, they're considered freedom fighters, and israel is considered to be commiting genocide in palestine... And the sentiment is spreading, not just in lebanon.
- ajsnigrutin 2y agoTo respond to person above, KLA was a terrorist organization recgnized by USA and many others too, then they became "valuable" in their geopolitical schemes, and US helped them, and many countries literally protected them in kosovo, including the president there, who was a member of KLA.
- c0rn3l1us 2y agoIt'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 2y agoBut how did just that specific software model explode and not the previous ones? Shouldn’t your case apply to all models then?
- glenstein 2y agoOther 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 2y agoThe 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 2y agoIt 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 2y agonewer reports saying 1000s not 100s https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/sep/17/middle-east-crisis-live-netanyahu-expands-gaza-war-aims-blinken-heads-to-egypt?page=with:block-66e997c48f08e43e1272b078#block-66e997c48f08e43e1272b078 https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/sep/17/middle-ea...
- gwervc 2y ago> 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 2y agoIf it was targeting pagers used for Hezbollah's internal communication then it would be justified, no?
- aaomidi 2y agoIf you make it acceptable to have these style of attacks, then they’re going to be replicated against your own government and people.
- nickff 2y agoHezbollah is already willing to shoot rockets at civilian targets; an attack like this is much more carefully-targeted than their average strike.
- tptacek 2y agoI think the ship has sailed on how far attacks will escalate in this region.
- HDThoreaun 2y agoHezbollah would nuke Israel if they could. You think they're above pager bombs? They just cant execute
- viraptor 2y agoSo 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?
- bhouston 2y ago[flagged]
- ASalazarMX 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- RIMR 2y agoThe 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 2y ago> 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 2y agoYeah, I'm getting the same energy from that claim as this: https://dtrap-blog.acm.org/2019/09/04/hackers-can-turn-your-home-computer-into-a-bomb/ https://dtrap-blog.acm.org/2019/09/04/hackers-can-turn-your-...
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoWas 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 2y agoalso make it hard to triangulate your location
- bewaretheirs 2y agoHezbollah reportedly bans its members from carrying cell phones and has them carry pagers instead: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/pagers-drones-how-hezbollah-aims-counter-israels-high-tech-surveillance-2024-07-09/ https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/pagers-drones-how-...
- aenis 2y agoThats an interesting attack vector on its own. Who does not regularly carry a phone with them these days?
- bluescrn 2y agoThat 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 2y agoAssuming 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 2y agoPagers 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.
- JPLeRouzic 2y agoIs it some device like this one? https://cat-uxo.com/explosive-hazards/ied/pager-bomb-rcied https://cat-uxo.com/explosive-hazards/ied/pager-bomb-rcied It's disgusting that humans can invent such devices.
- bluefishinit 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sergiotapia 2y ago[flagged]
- hyggetrold 2y agoHN tries to really avoid this kind of discussion since it never goes anywhere productive. Folks who have really strong views on Israel/Gaza are not going to change their perspective because of a comment thread on Hacker News.
- hiddencost 2y ago[flagged]
- pbiggar 2y agoI imagine the flagging is to stop the conversation about the geneocide, especially since almost every conversation about Gaza gets flagged.
- mola 2y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMIA_bombing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMIA_bombing
- hyggetrold 2y agoI'm ready to believe you but the impression I have from your comment is that it would take quite a bit to convince you to take a step back from your personal beliefs and re-evaluate. It doesn't even matter what you believe, based on what you wrote, my impression is that you are here to convince others that your viewpoint is correct, not necessarily to gain a new one.
- wiradikusuma 2y agoDoes anyone have a footage?
- mminer237 2y agohttps://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1836037485492629605 https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1836037485492629605
- rideontime 2y agoRevolting to see the replies cheering for the "wailing terrorist" who was just restocking produce.
- TiredOfLife 2y agoNeither of those videos show somebody restocking produce getting hurt.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- andyjohnson0 2y ago> 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.
- lm28469 2y agoIt wouldn't be a first https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash 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 2y agoCell phones were much bigger in 1996. You would have a hard time with that with phones today, but pagers are still viable.
- lm28469 2y agoReplace 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/OOWcTV2nEkU?feature=shared https://youtu.be/LrUY8QbEcpM?feature=shared https://youtu.be/LrUY8QbEcpM?feature=shared
- TheBen1 2y agoI imagine technological progress has been made in the field of explosives as well. I guess the volume and weight can very very small when you can determine that the phone is being held at the head and the explosion can partially be directed to it. Maybe it's even possible to leverage the energy within the battery?
- bgschulman31 2y agoThis 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 2y agoIsrael has done this in the past by supplying parts to Iran for printers that would explode https://apnews.com/article/iran-israel-ballistic-missile-sabotage-allegation-35bd868b28b9dc7b631fe5f2de4f3204 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 2y agoSeems like the israeli knew who these devices were addressed for, intercepted them and added explosives.
- bhouston 2y ago[flagged]
- yonisto 2y ago[flagged]
- bhouston 2y agoI am talking about people like current Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, not some random dude on Hacker News or Twitter: "he gave a speech in Paris at a podium featuring a map that included Jordan and the occupied West Bank as part of Israel and said the Palestinian people were 'an invention.'" https://www.axios.com/2023/03/20/bezalel-smotrich-jordan-greater-israel-map-palestinians https://www.axios.com/2023/03/20/bezalel-smotrich-jordan-gre... I'm not predicting the future, I am reporting what some believe and advocate for. My reporting is sourced.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bhouston 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- scohesc 2y agoThe 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 2y agoI 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?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ummonk 2y agoIt'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 2y agoThis is true, however I can also accept that a thread on this is going to descend into a shit show.
- toomuchtodo 2y agoHopefully 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 2y ago> 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 2y ago@dang
- Bluescreenbuddy 2y agoSo 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 2y agoThis 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 2y agoPretty 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 2y agoI 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 2y agoThere'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 2y ago> 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...
- akira2501 2y agoA nation state used it's awesome power to steal something that wasn't theirs and then altered it. This is not a hack. It's just brute force.
- npteljes 2y agoThe context clearly explains what OP means. The meaning is that "This is not something that is achieved via simply hacking a normal device remotely. This is something that is achieved via doing something extra to the device first, and maybe then hacking it remotely." Another thing is that if we begin to use "hack" for every means of attack and unauthorized access, then the word loses its meaning. There is no supply chain hack, but there is a supply chain attack.
- periode 2y ago[flagged]
- csomar 2y agoCan we have this thread back and make it strictly technical?
- dredmorbius 2y agoEmail 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 2y agoNo. 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 2y agoNot 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 2y agoLove to consider only the technical aspect of terrorist attacks that's what makes this News for Hackers yes.
- sys32768 2y agoSounds 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 2y ago[flagged]
- IG_Semmelweiss 2y agopigeons are still a thing
- xenospn 2y agonext up: anti-pigeon drones
- patrickmay 2y agoHawks. They're called hawks.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kobalsky 2y agosome 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 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container 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 2y agonot unprecedented https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash#Assassination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash#Assassination
- myth_drannon 2y agoThat one was a bomb, today's attack was by heating the lithium battery.
- tguvot 2y agonobody knows what happened today.
- myth_drannon 2y ago[flagged]
- no_exit 2y ago[flagged]
- myth_drannon 2y agoSub-contractors botched the job. Which reminds me, yesterday was 42th anniversary.
- fortran77 2y ago[flagged]
- IG_Semmelweiss 2y agoOne 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 2y agoI 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.
- lovelearning 2y agoThose medical personnel may also be members of Hezbollah. Doctors, nurses, and emergency responders can have ideological beliefs. For example, in my country, there are medical personnel with far-right and extremist views, some even holding leadership positions in such ideological organizations.
- repelsteeltje 2y agoIt's surely possible and or even plausible ideology has infiltrated civic institutions. Still it's quite a stretch to assume any victim of what looks like a supply chain attack is guilty, simply because of the scale of the attack.
- hajile 2y agoIt is evil to go around blowing up people for what they "might believe".
- 317070 2y agoThere will be better experts here, but it is correct that batteries cannot explode like this, right?
- amelius 2y agoGiven the amount of foreign EVs already in this country, let's hope not.
- busterarm 2y agoPager 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 2y agoYou can use cyphertext inside the plaintext. Seems to be what they are doing.
- busterarm 2y agoYou 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 2y agosure. 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 2y agoLet'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 2y agoOh 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 2y agoPagers 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.
- DonaldFisk 2y agoA possible explanation of how it happened: https://www.lbcgroup.tv/news/lebanon-news/796406/understanding-the-pager-and-how-it-can-explode/en https://www.lbcgroup.tv/news/lebanon-news/796406/understandi...
- tamimio 2y agoI 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 2y agoFootage of explosions: https://x.com/cherylwroteit/status/1836041510233444404 https://x.com/cherylwroteit/status/1836041510233444404 From the hospital (NSFW): https://x.com/nexta_tv/status/1836052147646955935 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.
- alexose 2y ago[flagged]
- some_random 2y agoSupply chain attack putting some RDX into a shipment of pagers
- snird 2y ago[flagged]
- bluefishinit 2y ago[flagged]
- vlovich123 2y ago[flagged]
- snird 2y ago[flagged]
- VerminOctopus1 2y ago[flagged]
- xdennis 2y ago[flagged]
- bluefishinit 2y ago[flagged]
- dang 2y agoYou've been using HN primarily to post about this topic. That sort of single-agenda account is not allowed here—see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=primarily%20test%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... for why. I've therefore banned this as well as what appears to be a different account you've been using to do the same thing. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with—it will eventually get your main account banned as well. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. I suppose I need to add that this has nothing to do with your views on the underlying topic. Plenty of other HN users share your views while remaining within the site guidelines. It's when an account crosses into using HN primarily for this purpose that a moderation line is crossed.
- proshno 2y ago[flagged]
- proshno 2y ago[flagged]
- harimau777 2y agoThis 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?
- 93po 2y ago[flagged]
- brookst 2y agoEveryone 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.
- tptacek 2y agoIf that were the case, Israel wouldn't be intricately planting bombs in Hezbollah pagers.
- Vicinity9635 2y ago[dead]
- the_cat_kittles 2y ago
- matltc 2y agoI searched 'pager batteries' on Amazon and most are NiMH, not lithium.
- CommanderData 2y agoSucks 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 2y ago> 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 2y agoInteresting, never knew this. Do modern pagers transmit any RF at all?
- toast0 2y agoThere'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.
- heraldgeezer 2y ago[flagged]
- sbeam 2y agoIf 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 2y agoWe 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash#Assassination
- minkles 2y agoExactly 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 2y agoI’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 2y agoNot 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
- grahamj 2y agoCrazy. I wonder if they were used for tracking until they were found out, at which point BOOM
- BurningFrog 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- throwaway55479 2y agoAt 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-east-crisis-live-netanyahu-expands-gaza-war-aims-blinken-heads-to-egypt?CMP=share_btn_url&page=with%3Ablock-66e9a2048f085fa2473a2e3e#block-66e9a2048f085fa2473a2e3e https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/sep/17/middle-ea...
- listless 2y agoGood lord that’s a lot of damage from exploding pagers. This is kind of next level stuff here - straight out of a movie.
- dredmorbius 2y ago[flagged]
- listless 2y agoOr right next to their genitals. I feel like we’ve got a lot of maimed members out there.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago[flagged]
- bluefishinit 2y ago[flagged]
- DavidD 2y agoMy 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 2y agoSeems 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 2y agoIt'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 2y agoMarket 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).
- einszwei 2y agoFrom 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 2y agoIt's said those devices were Iranian made. What makes you think Israel has any overt involvement in the supply chain to begin with?
- coolhand2120 2y ago[flagged]
- bluefishinit 2y agoI don't think the Times Of Israel is an unbiased source. This isn't trustworthy reporting.
- morwanger 2y ago[flagged]
- izwasm 2y ago8 year old girl was dead there, not only hezbollah members uses it, hospitals uses it too
- ceejayoz 2y ago[flagged]
- izwasm 2y ago[flagged]
- wsc981 2y agoIf 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 2y agoApparently 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.
- heraldgeezer 2y ago[flagged]
- nemo44x 2y ago[flagged]
- yupitis 2y ago[flagged]
- Waterluvian 2y agoAs 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 2y agoIt's probably going to turn out to be supply chain and explosives.
- yieldcrv 2y ago[flagged]
- TiredOfLife 2y agoAnd yet they let Hezbollah operate there.
- yieldcrv 2y agoOoh in that case nevermind then
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pbiggar 2y ago[flagged]
- mola 2y ago[flagged]
- tonetheman 2y ago[dead]
- zelias 2y agoI 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDalKxcLQC8
- ofcrpls 2y agoDark 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 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59644256-dark-wire
- dewey 2y agoReally good book, I've just finished it a few weeks ago and can recommend it.
- carstenhag 2y agoAlso related, but rather a malware attack: Europol/French Police compromising all Encrochat phones in 2020.
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y agoFor 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EncroChat
- hydrox24 2y agoThe Australian Federal Police and the US FBI launched a similar attack a few years ago where they sold a few thousand phones to underworld figures. The phones had an apparently encrypted and hidden chat app pre-installed on them which was feeding all the messages and data to the police.[0] [0]: https://www.afp.gov.au/about-us/history/unique-stories/operation-ironside https://www.afp.gov.au/about-us/history/unique-stories/opera...
- apienx 2y ago"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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNEb-dY3tRY
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dredmorbius 2y agoJust 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/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog-september-17-2024/>
- robertoandred 2y ago[flagged]
- rany_ 2y agoI'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.
- Qem 2y ago> 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. Also in the anniversary of WWII hero Folke Bernadotte assassination by Zionists. See https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israel-s-forgotten-hero-the-assassination-of-count-bernadotte-and-the-death-of-peace-934094.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israel-...
- 24currynigger 2y ago[flagged]
- chrisco255 2y agoWhile a clever attack it's also highly likely there was collateral damage to nonviolent or noninvolved bystanders.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bigbinary 2y agoAlready 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 2y agoIs "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 2y agoTbh 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
- morwanger 2y ago[flagged]
- judah 2y agoWatch 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.
- 2y ago
- elintknower 2y agoI 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/ https://squidgeefish.com/projects/a1175-battery-hacking/
- hpone91 2y agoSomeone must have watched Knock Off from 1998
- janmo 2y agoIntelligence 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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- diggan 2y ago> 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 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 2y agoI guess it is better to weigh it just after the purchase from a random store and from there the weight should never change.
- dbtablesorrows 2y agoAre you in hezbollah as well?
- diggan 2y agoIf so, I'd expect my phone to weigh too much rather than too little, because of the added explosives.
- n_ary 2y ago[flagged]
- smoothjazz 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- loeg 2y ago[flagged]
- smoothjazz 2y ago[flagged]
- hello_computer 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kart23 2y agosomeone in the US government is probably freaking out about all these iphones and macbooks made in china right now.
- morwanger 2y ago[flagged]
- underlipton 2y agoThis is a little over-the-top, but I do agree that the clinical way some are handling this understates the horror of what's happening. These people were at home or running errands or at work, not pointing a gun at anyone at that particular moment.
- talldayo 2y agoWith fairness though, this is exactly the risk we run as an importer-state of electronics that cannot secure our own supply chains. We've been dealing with the digital risk of backdoored electronics for the better half of a decade; physical risks were only a matter of time. There exists meaningful mitigation (eg. inspect imported electronics at random) but ultimately this risk is our just-deserts as Americans. If our smartphone and car manufacturers didn't take their jobs to other countries, then we'd be able to sleep a whole lot easier. Turns out, there is a bipartisan interest in making America hostile to manufacturing jobs.
- xeonmc 2y agoEvocative of the "power user" scene from Iron Sky[0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXWovt5-wfk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXWovt5-wfk
- tptacek 2y agoProbably not so much, no.
- dredmorbius 2y ago
- 0x_rs 2y agoSeems 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 https://x.com/gazanotice/status/1836082218805891360
- whimsicalism 2y agoprobably unrelated, lebanon is a big place
- jakeinspace 2y agoIt’s a very small place
- timnetworks 2y agohttps://x.com/AUBMC_Official/status/1836086847153320148 https://x.com/AUBMC_Official/status/1836086847153320148
- germandiago 2y agoIt was a cyberattack from Israel some rumours say.
- sroussey 2y agoDid the pagers all receive the same text message before they exploded?
- throwaway392381 2y ago[flagged]
- gmd63 2y agoAnother 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 2y ago100% this.
- knallfrosch 2y agoDo you think manufacturing pagers in Lebanon is a viable alternative?
- bowmessage 2y agoUndoubtedly, this attack has proven that it certainly is, at whatever cost.
- dijit 2y agoThe 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 2y agolebanon 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
- grumple 2y ago100 years ago Lebanon didn’t have running water and still had slavery. The Middle East hasn’t been a producer of goods, even domestically, since antiquity.
- cornercasechase 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- snird 2y ago[flagged]
- dang 2y agoWe've banned this account for egregiously breaking the site guidelines and for using HN primarily for political battle. Those things are not allowed here, even though I am sure that you have very legitimate reasons for feeling the way you do. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html p.s. I suppose I'd better add that yes, we treat accounts breaking the rules from the opposite site of the war in just the same way, and have moderated and banned many of those accounts as well.
- wigster 2y ago[flagged]
- bhouston 2y ago[flagged]
- jazzyjackson 2y ago[flagged]
- TheGuyWhoCodes 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ssdd333n6v 2y agoYou can't track a passive radio receiver.
- tptacek 2y agoWhat does that get Israel? I can tell you where most of Hezbollah's operatives and command staff are right now: they're in Dahieh.
- elteto 2y agoThis 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 2y agoUnfortunately 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 2y agoI 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.
- stoperaticless 2y agoIts quite simple to filter out Hesbolah from those injured. If it is fighting age male, then he is Hesbloah.
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago> 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 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-members-wounded-after-pagers-explode-in-lebanon https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/9/17/dozens-of-hezbollah...
- bhouston 2y agoSeems 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.ynetnews.com/article/bje3pjv60 https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-conflict/article-820399 https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-conflict/article-820399 https://www.timesofisrael.com/top-general-said-pushing-for-ground-incursion-to-create-south-lebanon-buffer-zone/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/top-general-said-pushing-for-g...
- elendee 2y agoit does seem like a purely escalatory move. wounding but not killing 1000+ of your deepest adversaries, slow clap... I'm sure Hezbollah will give up now that their pagers are destroyed.
- bufferoverflow 2y agoLebanon 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 2y ago> 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-border-attacks-between-israel-and-lebanon https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/6/27/mapping-7400-cross-... https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/800/cpsprodpb/bfa9/live/320f2410-4509-11ef-96a8-e710c6bfc866.png.webp https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/800/cpsprodpb/bfa9/live/320f24... https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cv2gj544x65o 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_(2023–present) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel–Hezbollah_conflict_(202...
- mmastrac 2y agoThat'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.
- superxpro12 2y agoFWIW, AP is reporting over 2800 injured, 200 seriously, with only 8 dead.
- aksss 2y agoSeeing 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.
- dmvdoug 2y agoJust Mossad Mossadin’.
- koolba 2y ago> 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.
- markus_zhang 2y agoRumor that this is the company that manufactures the pagers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Apollo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Apollo
- TheRealPomax 2y agoTitle really should say "pagers", not "devices".
- meindnoch 2y agoReminds 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 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 2y agoYahya Ayyash was a bombmaker for Hamas, not Hezbollah.
- meindnoch 2y agoTrue. Mea culpa!
- fernandotakai 2y agoit was not the mossad, it was the shin bet.
- m3kw9 2y agoA gram of c4 will do it?
- Sam6late 2y agoAt 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 2y agoIt reminds me of the movie Law Abiding Citizen. Check it out if you haven't already: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1197624/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1197624/
- maratumba 2y agoGives the term "remote code execution" a new meaning.
- MichaelMoser123 2y ago[flagged]
- bawolff 2y agoCant 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 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)
- fredgrott 2y agoPart 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 2y agoJ*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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jazzyjackson 2y ago[flagged]
- ein0p 2y ago[flagged]
- mrkeen 2y agoMaybe? Piss Lebanon off to engage in a public fight, and then defend yourself on the US's dime until you occupy their land.
- ein0p 2y agoI 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 2y agoSo, 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 2y agotimer?
- ComputerGuru 2y agoThere are now over two thousand injuries and at least one nine year old girl dead. This was a reckless attack, a war crime, and a blatant disregard of international law. You’re not targeting pacemakers embedded only in the chest cavities of known Hezbollah militants but devices often left around family and children. Hezbollah is a massive political entity with probably more non-combatants than combatants. The pagers are used by accountants, doctors, civil salarymen, it workers, and others that are not legal targets under IHL. EDIT: Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/sep/17/middle-east-crisis-live-netanyahu-expands-gaza-war-aims-blinken-heads-to-egypt https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/sep/17/middle-ea... > Among those killed is an eight-year-old girl from Bekka Valley, Abiad said, according to Al Jazeera. > At least 2,800 people have been wounded, he added, and more than 200 are in critical condition.
- tgv 2y ago2000? The article speaks of dozens at best, and no 9 year old girl.
- ComputerGuru 2y agoYes, hence the "there are now" part. I updated my comment with a source. I mixed up "nine fatalities" with "eight year old girl" to get "nine year old girl". Mea culpa.
- ok123456 2y agoYep. This is state-sponsored terrorism.
- fortran77 2y ago[flagged]
- mola 2y agoIf the pagers all belong to military targets is this a war crime? It means basically that all war is a crime. Which from an idealistic point of view I agree, but that's not how the world works. Rockets are fired to the Israeli north for a year now, about a 200k civilians are evacuated for a year now because the rockets are mostly randomly targeted. a 3 yo Israeli baby is still held hostage by hamas, never meeting the red cross. Are these war crimes?
- gojomo 2y agoAnd 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 2y agoI have a better idea. Every politician has a bomb collar tied to their approval rating. ;)
- dredmorbius 2y agoCookie cutters: <https://allthetropes.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age https://allthetropes.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age>
- cryptonector 2y agoItalo Calvino wrote a short story about politicians having to sacrifice parts of their bodies in order to hold positions of power, like you'd have to have a hand chopped off to serve one term, a leg to serve another, and so on.
- cryptonector 2y agoStanislav Lem wrote a short story about a tyrant that made his subjects wear highly enriched uranium earmuffs so that if more than two of them got together they would assemble a critical mass. https://culture.pl/en/work/uranium-ears-stanislaw-lem https://culture.pl/en/work/uranium-ears-stanislaw-lem
- lvl155 2y agoWe 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 2y agoLooks like a hardware supply chain attack: https://goachronicle.com/hezbollah-members-pagers-exploded-in-coordinated-attack-israel-suspected-of-hacking/ 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 2y agoThis sounds very likely.
- tootie 2y agoB&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 2y agoIf 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 2y ago> 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.
- wg0 2y agoDo we really know that these were explosives or lithium ion batteries on their own can be this dangerous?
- STRANGeR8 2y ago[flagged]
- trallnag 2y ago[flagged]
- STRANGeR8 2y ago[flagged]
- heraldgeezer 2y ago[flagged]
- Garvi 2y ago[flagged]
- talldayo 2y ago[flagged]
- Garvi 2y agoThe Dang is doing a great job at keeping the discussion "civil". As long as one doesn't count certain groups as people.
- talldayo 2y agoSucks for some of us with family in Lebanon but I doubt I'll be seen as human either. I won't name-and-shame, but I've worked at YC-sponsored startups that have asked me verbatim "How does it feel being a goyim, in [your] experience?" That is not a joke, unfortunately. Thankfully I didn't think highly of YC in the first place so it wasn't horribly shocking.
- dang 2y agoCivility is not a concept, nor a word, that we employ in HN moderation—we dropped it years ago. All people are counted as people by HN moderators. If it seems otherwise to you, I imagine that this is a combination of you having (1) not many explicit data points from us and (2) strong priors on the topic.
- switch007 2y agoThe title is egregiously bad
- dredmorbius 2y agoEmail suggested improvements to mods at hn@ycombinator.com
- switch007 2y agoI meant the article headline, sorry
- dredmorbius 2y agoHN permits (and encourages) title edits in certain cases, within certain parameters: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40734840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40734840> Again: email suggestions to mods. (Probably too late to matter in this case, but keep in mind in future.)
- submeta 2y ago[flagged]
- davedx 2y ago[flagged]
- doomroot 2y ago[flagged]
- dang 2y agoPlease don't do this here.
- throw16180339 2y agoIt isn't normally like this unless the topic is controversial.
- tharne 2y agoIf 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 2y agoWhat is HN's reason for not allowing submissions to be downvoted? Downvote seems like the most appropriate solution.
- dredmorbius 2y agoFor anyone with this response to any given story: you can use HN's "Hide" feature. If you have the spoons for it, flags / vouches (and mod emails) help, though on highly contentious topics, such as this one, there's a limit to what can be done.
- arminiusreturns 2y agoMy problem is with the obvious compromised assets who continually pop up on threads like this always pushing certain narratives. Look for yourself who has the most posts.
- system2 2y ago"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 2y agoLet'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 2y agoA question for more knowledgeable users: What CPU does Apollo AP-900 Pager use? I tried to search the Internet but found nothing.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kazinator 2y agoHow do you go from "dozens" in the headline to "several" in the opening paragraph, while respecting yourself as journalistic writer?
- nirav72 2y agoCertainly lot cheaper than a missile or two.
- passion__desire 2y agoMossad said - "Explain to me why it is more noble to kill 10,000 men in battle than a dozen at dinner."
- christkv 2y agoOk so they have incapacitated a large swath of the organisations leadership. Are they planning to roll in now ?
- golergka 2y ago[flagged]
- chgs 2y agoIf this can happen then there no way the TSA and other groups would be able to detect it.
- SuperManifolds 2y ago[flagged]
- dredmorbius 2y ago[flagged]
- mrvenkman 2y agoNothing 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 2y agoThere are videos on twitter and NY Times article explains more Pagers people had on their pants exploded
- Apocryphon 2y agoAmazingly 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 https://x.com/obdmpod/status/1836087414290284588
- paxys 2y agoAnd Kingsman: The Secret Service from 2014.
- Apocryphon 2y agoWeren't those surgical implants, though? A bit different, not an innocuous everyday gadget turned deadly. More of a Laputan Machine.
- peeters 2y agoYeah GP is probably merging two things that happen in the movie. One, the villain (played by Samuel Jackson) implants all of his "inner circle" with exploding implants to guarantee compliance, and late in the movie they are hacked so that the entire group is simultaneously assassinated with a single signal. Two, that same villain gives out free SIM cards to everyone on the planet that can be remotely triggered to throw everyone in range into a homicidal rage. The latter is probably what GP was thinking of, but they misremembered the effect.
- eigenspace 2y agoThis is nothing new. Israel has done attacks like this since the 60s.
- Apocryphon 2y agoThey've remotely triggered multiple consumer devices simultaneously?
- misiti3780 2y agohere is how they did it (supposedly): https://x.com/Osint613/status/1836111109742354507 https://x.com/Osint613/status/1836111109742354507
- dredmorbius 2y ago[flagged]
- panarky 2y agoI don't know the density of PETN and I'd prefer not to fire up a VPN to run that search at the moment, but let's assume it's something like 1.5 g/cm³ So 20 grams of the stuff would occupy 13.3 cm³ Which is equivalent to the volume of about three and a half AAA batteries. How big are these pagers, and how can there be that much empty space in one?
- dredmorbius 2y agoSpecs: - Dimensions (mm): 73(L) x 50(W) x 27(H) (98.55 cm^3) - Weight: 95g including battery Presumably the majority of that weight is battery. And 13.3 cm^3 would occupy less than 1/6 the total available volume. Battery is described as "Lithium battery, up to 85 days with 2.5 hours for full battery charge, USB-C charging." From: <https://www.gapollo.com.tw/product/ar-924/ https://www.gapollo.com.tw/product/ar-924/> Archive: <https://archive.is/Kw0Pg https://archive.is/Kw0Pg> (For some reason the origin is unreachable presently.) From comments and news stories elsewhere, it seems highly probable that the explosive was engineered into a battery form-factor, and replaced the original battery of the device.
- misiti3780 2y agocool downvote - why lol
- Hermandw 2y agoAmir 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 2y ago20 grams that's wild. You could only produce these kinds of effects from a 'military grade' explosive like CL-20 or similar.
- beezle 2y agoper 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 2y agoSo 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 2y ago[flagged]
- dredmorbius 2y ago[flagged]
- chemeril 2y ago20 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).
- feedforward 2y ago[flagged]
- awqe 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- zelphirkalt 2y agoThey 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 2y agoThe 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.
- anovick 2y ago[flagged]
- nemomarx 2y agoPlenty of people called Trump illegitimate, or say Putin is a strongman dictator now, I'm not sure why Nehtahnyu should be above reproach? Wasn't he almost investigated by the supreme Court during a power grab?
- s1artibartfast 2y ago[flagged]
- devit 2y agoI 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?
- abdellah123 2y agoThousands now were injured. This is a massive scale (terrorist) attack
- awqe 2y ago[flagged]
- ksaj 2y agoThe 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.
- yonran 2y agoSo how do you think that airport security will adjust to the widespread knowledge that you can hide an explosive alongside the battery?
- dredmorbius 2y ago[flagged]
- ksaj 2y agoEspecially now that it is abundantly clear that a pager's batteries are large enough to be replaced by quite an effective bomb. And cell phones are a fair amount larger than pagers. It seems the pager bombs only killed the users. But they also harmed a lot of people around them.
- ben7799 2y agoThey have other ways to detect explosives. I've had my stuff tested for explosives, and it did not involve turning anything on.
- ksaj 2y agoYes, they also use that sniffer wand over the keyboard. And some airports use dogs. Some rely on Xray and similar scans. Not every airport does exactly the same thing. Some do multiple things. I don't think it was even implied that all airports are exactly the same. My point was about density of battery and explosive material, and not about these "other ways." For that matter, the xrays and other visualization scans also show the density similarities between batteries and explosives. And that density was the entirety of my point.
- mef51 2y ago[flagged]
- office_drone 2y agoThis was a bombing of military personnel by parties at war. That is, by definition, not terrorism. This action has been acceptable for as long as bombs have existed.
- irundebian 2y agoDepends on the definition, right?
- anigbrowl 2y agoIf the identities of the parties were reversed it would absolutely be labeled as terrorism.
- ericmcer 2y agoWill be interesting to see the ratio of civilian to military injuries was and if this is better or worse than something like a bunch of drone strikes or rocket strikes.
- daedrdev 2y agoThere were probably a bunch of civilian casualties, but I imagine most Hezbollah operative wear their pagers since their main purpose is to always receive messages, so it was probably a low percentage.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- yoavm 2y agoThere's an on-going war between Hezbollah and Israel since Hezbollah attacked Israel on October 8th [0]. The pagers were to be used by Hezbollah members. Hezbollah is considered a terrorist organization by many countries, including Arab countries. Being a member of a terrorist organization isn't the best way to stay safe, especially not during a conflict that your organization initiated. I think that the fact that these explosions happened in public places isn't so relevant considering the size of the explosions. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Hezbollah_conflict_(2023%E2%80%93present)#Events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Hezbollah_confl...
- mef51 2y ago[flagged]
- yreg 2y agoThis comment got posted twice.
- nemo44x 2y ago[flagged]
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago[flagged]
- AlbertCory 2y ago[flagged]
- danielodievich 2y agoThere was a really dumb but also really entertaining Awkwafina/John Cena movie that I watched recently called Jackpot https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26940324/ 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 2y agoI 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
- piyh 2y agoWait for the "Tesla strike" in San Fran
- vander_elst 2y agoFrom 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 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- oytis 2y agoIt'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.
- HL33tibCe7 2y agoIt surely must be in violation of international law due to its potentially reckless/indiscriminate nature
- ebcode 2y agoIf the pagers had been equipped with lasers that caused blindness, there is a Geneva Convention protocol going back to 1995[0]. I would like to think that the spirit behind that protocol is that the intent to cause permanent blindness in your opponent should be considered a crime. And not that it's not a crime so long as you don't use a laser to do it. So you can put me in the camp of "this should be considered a war crime", even if it's not in any books yet. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Certain_Conventional_Weapons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Certain_Conventi...
- hajile 2y agoIf the pager was sent a message that would encourage the soldier to bring the pager to their face, it would certainly fall under an intentionally blinding attack.
- worik 2y agoBreaks my heart to see high tech used to create mayhem rather than improve the world
- golergka 2y ago[flagged]
- dredmorbius 2y ago[flagged]
- interestica 2y agoAre pagers allowed on airplanes? Most modern digital devices also carry a sealed Lithium ion pack....
- dredmorbius 2y ago[flagged]
- surume 2y ago[flagged]
- ajb 2y agoTangentially 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 2y agoLooking 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 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Lebanon_pager_explosions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Lebanon_pager_explosions
- JSDevOps 2y agoI 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.
- dredmorbius 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- donthatemebro 2y ago[flagged]
- ilikeitdark 2y agoQuestion: 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 2y agoIt'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 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 2y agoI 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 2y agoOK you just have to prevent it on OS level tbab. So the battery temperature doesn't go higher than a certain level.
- donthatemebro 2y ago[flagged]
- donthatemebro 2y ago[flagged]
- ridgeguy 2y agoThese 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 2y agoThe 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 2y agoI 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 2y agoAside 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.
- HL33tibCe7 2y agoOn the other hand, one could view this a show of force to try and scare Hezbollah away from further escalation
- esjeon 2y agoUN Security Council Resolution 1566 outlines what is considered as terrorism: "criminal acts, including against civilians, committed with the intent to cause death or serious bodily injury, or taking of hostages, with the purpose to provoke a state of terror in the general public or in a group of persons or particular persons, intimidate a population or compel a government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act." If their purpose was really about scaring Hezbollah away, this attack can be labelled as terrorism. I'm pretty sure politicians have different ideas there.
- solidninja 2y agoAh words hardly mean anything these days. It very clearly is terrorism but you won't ever hear any politician in the west calling it that.
- esjeon 2y agoYeah, true. It's either terrorism or borderline-terrorism at least. But people still gotta talk if they're not willing to wage another war against each other. We clearly have too many wars going around, so politicians will have to forge up some bullshit excuses.
- 2y ago
- nntwozz 2y agoWhat a dystopian time to be alive. Next thing we got Teslas driving off a cliff or AirPods exploding in peoples ears.
- remram 2y agoThe hunter drones are not far off. Probably with similar explosives.
- peterweyand38 2y ago[dead]
- peterweyand38 2y ago[dead]
- saintradon 2y agoThis is why Chinese made electric cars are a bad idea in America. But Kudos to Israel for pulling off a surgical strike the likes of which we've never seen before.
- ok123456 2y agoKudos to pulling off state-sponsored terrorism that killed many innocent civilians, including doctors and nurses who relied on the same pagers? This is like celebrating the 9/11 hijackers for the "creative hack" of using a box cutter.
- hackerlight 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- fortran77 2y ago[flagged]
- tredre3 2y ago> This is why Chinese made electric cars are a bad idea in America. You mean Teslas?
- Aleksdev 2y agoNow this is hacker news!
- aussieguy1234 2y agoHonestly, at this point, I see absolutely zero difference, from a moral perspective, between the Israeli government and their enemies. Both are as bad as each other and have been implicated in many war crimes and human rights abuses, however Israel has more firepower and can inflict much more damage (E.g. demolish an entire apartment block, killing hundreds of innocent people from the air). The last thing any country should consider doing is arming or funding either side, that will be like throwing fuel on a fire. Taking sides in what is essentially a regional ethnic conflict between extremists on both sides is not a good idea. Again, not condoning or justifying the actions of either side or taking any sides here - they are both as bad as each other.
- fsckboy 2y ago[flagged]
- dannyfreeman 2y ago[flagged]
- fsckboy 2y agoI was equating terrorism and and virulent anti-semitism and violent suppression of women's rights, gay rights, free speech, and democracy with barbarism. Israeli Arabs are happy to live in Israel. If you have a better word, I'd be happy to use it. Barbarity?
- aussieguy1234 2y agoTheir current government is basically run by extremists, with government ministers openly calling for a second Nakba https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231009-israel-mk-calls-for-a-second-nakba-in-gaza/ https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231009-israel-mk-calls-f.... Calling for a second Nakba, in my opinion, is no different to the chants of "death to isreal" coming from the other side. I would say they are about as democratic as the former south african apartheid government. Democratic yes, but only one group of people gets to vote.
- 2y ago
- logicziller 2y agoWhy were they even using pagers? Aren't all messages in cleartext?
- atdt 2y agoPOCSAG is an ideal for broadcasting low-sensitivity push notifications, like "report to your local commanding officer by 15:00 today". These messages don't need encryption, just a reliable way to reach militants without revealing their location.
- FridayoLeary 2y ago>Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon why is the title so bland? It fails spectacularly at communicating the scale of the event. They went with a dog bites man headline instead.
- fsckboy 2y agoI'm getting tired of everybody saying "supply chain, supply chain": first, you have no information. second, it's so non-specific, it's less informative than "they inserted exploding batteries into the supply chain" vs "a container that was unloaded was not actually from the source" which I would say isn't even supply chain, like if I leave a box of dog poop at your door, I haven't tampered with your "supply chain" maybe this hack started with hearing that they were going to upgrade devices. maybe it this hack started with convincing them to upgrade. maybe Turkey did it. maybe ISIS did it, they hate hezbollah. it doesn't make you sound more informed to say "supply chain", it makes you sound less.
- sharpshadow 2y ago[flagged]
- Maken 2y ago>second, it's so non-specific, it's less informative than "they inserted exploding batteries into the supply chain" vs "a container that was unloaded was not actually from the source" which I would say isn't even supply chain, like if I leave a box of dog poop at your door, I haven't tampered with your "supply chain" Almost all of the global commerce happens by contained carried by ship or plane. That someone can take a container full of electronics, tamper with them, and sell them without even the manufacturer noticing has very serious implications. Your phone and your laptop were also inside of a container, and were also handled by dozens of middleman companies. have you ever opened them and check every component? Can you assert you are not carrying a timed bomb in your pocket?
- mcoliver 2y ago"The New York Times reported that Israel hid explosive material in the Taiwan-made Gold Apollo pagers before they were imported to Lebanon, citing American and other officials briefed on the operation. The material was implanted next to the battery with a switch that could be triggered remotely to detonate." Wild
- FridayoLeary 2y agoThat is pretty similar to what has been guessed so far. The posters here speculated that the charge was concealed inside the battery. Also some reports said that the batteries themselves heated up triggering the explosives. does the report mention if this was a physical switch or just some sort of control circuit?
- tylerflick 2y agoThe majority of plastic based high explosives are designed to be very stable, and require both heat and pressure to detonate, so my educated guess is they implanted something along the lines of a blasting cap into the pagers. I’ve seen PETN mentioned, but again, that is designed to be stable.
- FridayoLeary 2y agoSo trigger some kind of process to cause the batteries to overheat + detonate the blasting cap after a short delay? I'd be interested to know how it was packaged if it was done in a way that wouldn't look suspicious if someone looked inside the pager. The bomb-in-the- battery theory is a good one.
- tylerflick 2y agoRealistically it wouldn’t require much volume in the battery. For reference, the amount of explosive material in a blasting cap is about the size of an eraser head, and is easily capable of the explosions in the videos.
- 2y ago
- hettygreen 2y agoImagine what they could do with the battery in an electric car.. thankfully the security on vehicles is so good that a hack like this would be impossible eh?
- talldayo 2y agoIt's very easy to imagine what they'd do with the battery in an electric car. They would do the same thing they did to the pager: put a bomb in it. You cannot "detonate" a lithium ion battery with remote code execution unless you have tampered with the components surrounding it. It's not so much about the security on vehicles and more about the practical limits. Thermal runaway is only going to happen if you manage to disable the battery's shutoff safeguard (which is usually replicated in hardware and firmware). Unlike phones, you can't really heat up the CPU and force the battery to take the heat. You would have to manipulate the drivetrain in a way that unnaturally damaged the hardware, something a driver would notice almost immediately. Getting the conditions right for a software-based exploit is a circus act compared to installing a plastic explosive and remote detonator outside the battery stowage.
- 01acheru 2y agoThreat model: The Mossad doing Mossad things with your [change "email address" with "anything"] Solution: - Magical amulets? - Fake your own death, move into a submarine? - YOU'RE STILL GONNA BE MOSSAD'ED UPON I think that's it. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/08/mickens_on_secu.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/08/mickens_on_se... Full read here https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf
- phirgate 2y agoThis is terrorism. Israel is not an island defending from terrorist, they are the ones spreading terror. What they did to their neighbouring countries could be happen to others. Can we stop praising this as clever and impressive attack and start holding Israel accountable!?
- djohnston 2y agoTheir neighbouring country whose southern region is run by a designated terrorist organisation? The same org that has been indiscriminately launching rockets at civilians towns for a year straight? Oh yeah Israel is definitely the terrorist you’re right XD
- hajile 2y ago> Former Israeli officials have openly acknowledged Israel's role in providing funding and assistance to Hamas as a means of undermining secular Palestinian factions such as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev, who served as the Israeli military governor in Gaza during the early 1980s, admitted to providing financial assistance to Mujama Al-Islamiya, the precursor of Hamas, on the instruction of the Israeli authorities. > in 1998, it was revealed that Netanyahu suggested Turkey to support Hamas. Netanyahu said "Hamas also has bank accounts for aid in banks, we help them too, you [Turkey] can help too." > In an interview with Politico in 2023, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that "In the last 15 years, Israel did everything to downgrade the Palestinian Authority and to boost Hamas." He continued saying "Gaza was on the brink of collapse because they had no resources, they had no money, and the PA refused to give Hamas any money. Bibi saved them. Bibi made a deal with Qatar and they started to move millions and millions of dollars to Gaza." Israel is surprised that the terrorists they funded do terrorist things? The obvious conclusion is that they WANTED Hamas to do those terrorist things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_support_for_Hamas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_support_for_Hamas
- YZF 2y agoIt's the very opposite. It's the most precise targeting of enemy combatants ever. Hezbollah (and effectively Lebanon) started a war on Israel on Oct 8th in solidarity with Hamas' attacks on Israel (before Israel has even responded really) and has continued indiscriminate attacks against Israeli civilians since resulting in more than 100,000 internally displaced people in Israel. Many dead and injured. Most recently children in a soccer match. Israel has repeatedly demanded Hezbollah stop attacking it and warned it of grave consequences. This is consequences. The only "neighbouring countries" of other countries that have something to worry about are those that start wars against their neighbours.
- malkia 2y agoThis blowing while you are fueling up your car.... hmmm
- novolunt 2y ago[dead]
- nova22033 2y agoThis is like Anom but with explosives
- softgrow 2y agoI'm a long way from Lebanon, but carry two pagers for Emergency Services (one per service). One used to be an Apollo Gold but now it isn't. From what I've read these were modified pagers, but I still rang one manager for reassurance. We need a strong statement for all the emergency responders and medical staff that still use these things that it's not going to happen to you.
- calf 2y agoIsrael drone struck Jose Andres' food truck program this year. Between these acts of war between stupid, angry countries, there needs to be not just guarantees for aid workers, but broad international condemnation of tactics that violate the Geneva Convention and related principles. And those principles are long overdue for high-tech drone strikes, robotics and electronics warfare.
- Sammi 2y ago[flagged]
- senectus1 2y agoHow did they know who was using the modified pagers? How did they know they were only Hezbollah people? Are there inocent people walking around with modifed explosive devices strapped to their waists? To their kids waists? This seems potentially extremely reckless.
- ironfootnz 2y agoNew fear unlocked!!! I will no longer look at my phone the same way!
- sudohalt 2y agoThis is a great article going over why the settler colonial apartheid genocidal state of Israel engages in such operations: https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/rp216_omar_shock.pdf https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09...
- known 2y ago[dead]
- shartshooter 2y agoWould the explosives in these pagers have been caught by something like TSA? I could imagine that at please *some* of the owners had to have flown with them. Were they caught? If not, why not?
- creato 2y agoHezbollah is considered a terrorist organization by most countries that also have airport security. I really doubt the people with these pagers would go anywhere near a TSA checkpoint.
- vincentpants 2y agoWeren't these people mostly emergency responders? Like doctors and EMTs? And yes, killed several, but also injured thousands? I'm a little concerned by the vocabulary used in the op title.
- charbroiled 2y agoHezbollah started encouraging its operatives to switch to pagers months ago, out of fear that Israel would compromise or had compromised their cell phones. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/pagers-drones-how-hezbollah-aims-counter-israels-high-tech-surveillance-2024-07-09/ https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/pagers-drones-how-... It seems likely that a significant number of the thousands injured were Hezbollah militants. How significant? We’ll have to wait for the numbers. I haven’t seen any indication that the exploding pagers were held by emergency responders in a significant quantity. Do you have a source for that?
- vincentpants 2y agoA lot of what I have been following is from here[1] and mentions: - "Today's attacks exposed many members at various levels. While the group says many of those injured are medical staff or administrative personnel and not fighters..." as well as - "Then we started seeing CCTV from inside shops and supermarkets of these small explosions targeting people doing their groceries or paying at the checkout. Then for hours on end [we heard] the wail of sirens. The internal security forces were asking people to get off the streets because traffic was overwhelming the city." And from my understanding of that region's geopolitics, isn't Hezbollah a political party? So this is like reading about a nation state blanket bombing targets that are of members of the Republican party right? [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cwyl9048gx8t https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cwyl9048gx8t
- vincentpants 2y agoI just noticed my use of 'mostly' which unintentionally is doing more heavy lifting than it should. I was incorrect to use that word, but the point remains.
- torginus 2y agoHonestly just slept on the thing and the story seems even more surreal to me now. How come they needed to replace their pagers AT ONCE recently? Has there been some great breakthrough in pager technology? I have a 5 year old phone and no desire to replace it for at least a couple years more. How come everyone had the EXACT same model? Even if the Israelis didn't compromise it, even the most incompetent intelligence agency would notice somebody ordering thousands of an item with an usual order count of zero. Anyone with a very basic knowledge of supply chain attacks knows you don't buy just one kind of item. If they bought fifty different kinds of pagers, this attack would've been impossible. I'm sure even in benign cases, placing an order of thousands of items on some niche product causes a lead time of months/weeks. Never mind that the Israelis had to painstakingly modify every single one under the cloak of secrecy. Didn't that raise any flags? And after they did order thousands of the same item, they didn't bother opening up even a single one? Honestly I don't think incompetence could explain this, I'm 99% sure Hezbollah is compromised at a high level.
- gamer191 2y ago> How come they needed to replace their pagers AT ONCE recently? Hezbollah recently switched to using only pagers for communication, because they were worried about Israel hacking their phones. It's likely they all bought pagers at the same time because of that, because I doubt any of them would have owned pagers already
- Sammi 2y ago[flagged]
- timcambrant 2y agoI agree with all of your questions. But covert organizations fall victims for this type of vulnerability all the time. Operation Trojan Shield and the ANOM network is one example. Operation Firewall and the ShadowCrew takedown was another. I believe LulzSec was taken down by bad opsec in the internal IRC channel as well. Bin Laden wasn't able to mix up his use of couriers and locations enough to stay hidden forever. It's easy for us to see the mistakes and point out that the criminals should have been more diligent or mixed up their operations more, but that would take more effort than anyone can consistently give over time. Operational security is really hard and requires constant dedication which most organizations can't keep up over time. Eventually the most professional organizations will slip up and make some of the mistakes you point out above. It's very likely that someone has spies or informants inside organizations such as Hizbollah and Hamas. But this can also have been a lapse in standard operations that was finally detected and exploited by Mossad after actively watching for a long time.
- known 2y ago[dead]
- achow 2y agoIsrael's Mossad spy agency planted a small amount (3 gm) of explosives inside 5,000 pagers made by Gold Apollo (a Taiwanese company). "The Mossad injected a board inside of the device that has explosive material that receives a code." 3,000 of the pagers exploded when a coded message was sent to them. Gold Apollo founder Hsu Ching-Kuang said the pagers used in the explosion were made by a company in Europe that had the right to use the Taipei-based firm's brand, "The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it" Hezbollah fighters have been using pagers as a low-tech means of communication in an attempt to evade Israeli location-tracking, https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/3-grams-of-explosives-per-pager-israel-complex-op-to-hurt-hezbollah-6590229 https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/3-grams-of-explosives-per-pa...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dotancohen 2y agoThank you. Where do you have this information from?
- figassis 2y agoReuters: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-planted-explosives-hezbollahs-taiwan-made-pagers-say-sources-2024-09-18/ https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-planted-exp...
- b112 2y agoYou know, as this is a tech forum, I'll reply via a tech business, re: branding angle. Yes Gold Apollo, they were yours. That's because you licensed your name, and your name is your business. (EG your mark(name) of trade) I've seen this in everything from hotels to frying pans. License that name! We made 1% more this quarter. Yeehaw! Holiday in has corporate owned hotels, franchised hotels, and of course licensed hotels. Franchised ones have more control from corporate, licensed far less. And it shows. Same as t-fal, which in Canada is just the cheapest junk you can get, with Canadian Tire owning and manufacturing under the name: https://www.canadiantire.ca/en/pdp/t-fal-viva-aluminum-frying-pan-non-stick-dishwasher-oven-safe-black-0420043p.html https://www.canadiantire.ca/en/pdp/t-fal-viva-aluminum-fryin... Anyone buyong t-fal pans there will think t-fal is the cheapest junk ever. Because it is. This worked well pre-Internet, but now people see reviews for Canadian Tire t-fal when researching pans in Europe. Way to trash your local name. Licensing your name doesn't work the same in 2024 as 1994. Don't do it.
- tobyhinloopen 2y agoA technically amazing but otherwise terrifying act.
- mediumsmart 2y ago[flagged]
- Woshiwuja 2y ago[flagged]
- wiz21c 2y agoHow do you intercept so many beepers ? - you have to know they have been ordered - you have to know when they are sent (from Europe) - you have to intercept them (in which country ?) - to modify them - to put them back in the delivery (so you have ties with the shipping company) - without nobody noticing So Israel was likely not alone, or they have agents in many places...
- dncornholio 2y agoI don't think they intercepted. Think they just bought the pagers, prepared them and sold them directly to Hezbollah in one big batch.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- whoitwas 2y agoThis is really sick and should result in major sanctions against Israel. USA should never give them another penny, take the nukes, and let them wither. They've become pure hate. This is a standard that can't be allowed and Israel must be punished.
- danbmil99 2y ago[flagged]
- sharpshadow 2y ago[flagged]
- kombine 2y agoIf it was not a terrorist attack and a war crime but a targeted operation against the militants, why wouldn't Israel claim responsibility for the successful operation?
- olalonde 2y agoWhat incentive would they have for doing so?
- sim7c00 2y agocountries i think don't comit acts of war randomly without annoucement or claim. This in itself would be borderline criminal, though i'm not sure if it's an actual thing noted in the geneva conventions. Those do state that any act of war should give an opportunity for retaliation. So in essence this is just as criminal as bombing people using armed drones, because these fighters did not have any opportunity to strike back.
- flyinglizard 2y agoYou're throwing "criminal" around without, I suspect, understanding the laws of warfare. Blowing enemy operatives isn't criminal (even if some civilians get hurt - within reason; here's the ratio of militants to civilians hurt is virtually unheard of, in a positive way). Bombing militants from above, whether by airplane or drone isn't criminal, and nothing in the laws of warfare claims you need to let the enemy an opportunity to strike back.
- abalone 2y agoThere is no comprehensive information yet on the ratio of civilians to militants maimed by this attack, and any claims otherwise are propaganda. If an enemy had exploded small remote controlled bombs in American supermarkets and homes there is no question we would characterize it as a terrorist attack.
- kombine 2y ago
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- GrumpyNl 2y agoHow long will it take to make a movie about this?
- pvaldes 2y agoHmm. I have a couple of politic fiction questions. Lets would imagine that somebody takes a flight with a pager or a second-hand bought phone. 1) How could be sure that there is not a small amount of explosive hidden in their devices or batteries?. Most devices are sealed. Would the phone smell like something in particular? Would be detected by dogs or x-rays? (I assume that a tiny amount of explosive can be put inside a battery or anything, enough to start a chain reaction with the whole battery while remains hidden to x-rays). 2) What would be the legal path on the defense of this person? just "I didn't knew" does not seem very convincing in a trial. If somebody manipulates a phone are the data stored somewhere?
- negativeonehalf 2y agoIt's surprising that Mossad arranged a massive destruction of communication technology without it being the precursor to a major military operation. Very curious why they chose this moment to execute an operation they clearly had ready to go for months.
- alecco 2y agohttps://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-09-18/ty-article-live/lebanese-security-source-mossad-planted-explosives-in-5-000-pagers-ordered-by-hezbollah/00000192-02f1-df36-ad96-0afbea560000 https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-09-18/ty-article-li... "use it or lose it" moment, allegedly.
- figassis 2y agoGold Apollo, the company whose brand was on the devices says they did not manufacture them, they only licensed their brand to BAC, a Hungarian company. Well, I'm sure income from licensing fees in their accounting books say differently. You profit from it, you should pay for it. Any other way to see this will allow this type of vulnerability to spread and the buck will stop nowhere.
- hajile 2y agoWhy would devices made in Hungary be labelled "made in Taiwan"?
- surfingdino 2y agoThe market for 3d X-Ray scanners and population surveillance is about to explode.
- pilooch 2y agoThey could have seen it while fixing a pager... Or those things work so well, never break...
- gadders 2y agoThere must be a bit of tradecraft involved. How did Mossad ensure these particular pagers were bought? Who was the salesperson that (presumably) gave Hezbollah a good deal on them?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- snird 2y ago[dead]
- L0stLink 2y ago[flagged]
- KaiserPro 2y agoI'm still not really sure why Isreal causes such polarised emotions. However, one thing is certain, this level of polarisation is not going to help. The "fixing" of Israel and its neighbours requires a change of attitude from many people, including us. Currently, there are no "good guys" only future victims. Its all to easy to see someone bomb civilians and say "well yeah its justified because they did it first." Ok, I understand, but how do you get to a state where that doesn't happen again? There are other wars we can draw some parallels from that might help. Most notably is the irish civil war in the 6 counties (1919-200x). Britian went round shooting anyone that looked like the IRA, and the IRA went round shooting andbombing, the UDF et all also bombed and shot whomever they thought were wrong. THe war intensified, but it was only when all the players started talking did something good happen (Ireland, UK, USA) The problem here is that the number of parties that need to talk are quite high, and two of the main actors are currently run be recalcitrant pricks.
- Arkhaine_kupo 2y ago> I'm still not really sure why Isreal causes such polarised emotions. Not to state the obvious but the largeest distinction between israel and every other country its that its a mostly jewish country. > THe war intensified, but it was only when all the players started talking did something good happen The bigger issue here is that while talks have been attempted many times, there is a sense on both sides of bad faith negotiations. In Ireland, bad as it was, there was a feeling the other side "would get too much" but not that they were outright lying about their aims. > The problem here is that the number of parties that need to talk are quite high There is also the problem of little value to human life. Religious fanatism, afterlife promises and even goverment sponsored programs such as martyr funds have devalued human life to a point where here is little basis on what to use as foundational goal for peace.
- hajile 2y ago
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 9cb14c1ec0 2y agoWhat's the probability that the pagers were also bugged to allow Mossad to listen in? Pretty high, I would guess.
- hhh 2y agoThe pagers were for a POCSAG network, they don't have to bug the pagers to listen in.
- 9cb14c1ec0 2y agoI was thinking more of the underlying encryption being compromised.
- hhh 2y agoWhat encryption? It’s POCSAG
- krembo 2y agoIf one thing taught from this James Bond movie act, is that you should never say never.
- Bluestein 2y agoMany questions remain, but, also, one: If Mossad had the capability to pull off such a complex supply chain fiesta here, could they not as certainly hack the firmware to intercept all traffic? (Now that Hezbollah is alledged to be using them to communicate?) Maybe they did, and - at this point - decided that detonating them was preferable to having the asset - and whatever information it was yielding ... ... which is worrying.- PS. There's talk of this being a "use it or lose it" kind of scenario, with the pagers being close to compromised.-
- anon168 2y ago[dead]
- FollowingTheDao 2y agoIf that is not terrorism I do not know what is...
- JCharante 2y agowow, if anyone suggested this supply chain attack as a possibility then everyone would brush it off
- ada1981 2y agoThis must clearly be a violation of international law. Wild that the US media is reporting this as some mysterious, awe inspiring tactic.
- 0goel0 2y ago[dead]
- Havoc 2y agoThat’s a lot of injured and very angry very freshly motivated terrorists…and not a lot of dead ones. Not convinced this is a net win for Israel
- bbqfog 2y agoIt's also going to be devastating to the Israeli economy. Who would possibly use Israeli tech now?
- trallnag 2y agoIsrael loses if it kills it's enemies. That's your logic? Reminds me of Trudeau "if you kill your enemies, they win".
- Havoc 2y ago>Israel loses if it kills it's enemies. That's your logic? huh? No not at all Saying that those 2k+ injured Hammas are going to spend time recovering and when they're back they're going to be even more motivated to harm Israel. Would have been better to do nothing. Or to kill them. But nothing in between.
- botanical 2y agoApartheid Israel really are terrorists. This was representative of that, killing 2 children in the process. There could be 186,000 deaths since October in their current Genocide of the Palestinians. No wonder Hamas and Hezbollah exist, the same way uMkhonto we Sizwe existed in Apartheid South Africa. They need to be sanctioned and their leaders put in a court of the ICC.
- anovikov 2y agoFantastically executed. One-off trick, but what a brilliant one.
- borkborkNfork 2y ago[flagged]
- treebeard901 2y agoIt is reasonable to assume a Mossad agent would have pagers as potential way to communicate. Pagers work on separate networks from cell phones and usually do not have the same location tracking. It is also fair to assume that Mossad would want the ability to remotely destroy an agents pager. If it was captured, etc. So very likely these were already a standard part of their equipment and then distributed to Lebanon. It is also interesting how fear of cell phone tracking drove them to pagers, which was then exploited in response. It is different from Stuxnet and a form of terrorism. Same as all the assassinations. They are crossing all of these lines that can be a double edged sword in the long run.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- cykros 2y agoGotta love the passive voice they keep using. Can't be bothered to say that the pagers didn't just blow up themselves, but were actively armed and detonated in a large scale international terrorist attack by a regime actively engaged in a genocide whose leadership is wanted by both major international courts. Way to go Reuters, meeting expectations exactly.