8 ms·

That's an impressive supply-chain hack. Spend years showing how insecure modern telecom devices are and scare your enemy into going old-school, receive-only. Se

• superxpro12 2y ago
  FWIW, AP is reporting over 2800 injured, 200 seriously, with only 8 dead.
  • aksss 2y ago
    Seeing some video from one of the hospitals, there's a lot of variety to the injuries. It looks like some people were looking at the pager when it exploded (injury to face and hand), some were wearing it on hip, some in pocket, some probably in an across-the-chest fanny pack. It would seem this attack has managed to kill some, maim many, tag all, terrorize, and disrupt.
• dmvdoug 2y ago
  Just 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.
  • ars 2y ago
    It wasn't time based. Videos show the pager making some kind of signal or message that caused the person holding it to look at it.
    • anigbrowl 2y ago
      That doesn't follow. You could have a timer that causes the pager to vibrate as if it had received a message or an alarm had rung. That would make the attack simpler, in that one wouldn't also have to compromise (or risk leaving traces in) the phone system to activate thousands of pagers.
      • rocqua 2y ago
        I'd imagine a backup timer, with the ability to trigger early if required for strategic or tactical purposes. I almost surprised this wasn't coordinated with (or saved for) an incursion into Libanon. That seems to be something Israel wants to do, and this would be a great way to disrupt the defense at the most critical moment.
        • ars 2y ago
          A timer is too risky. The was done months in advance - what if the war was over? I think this was meant for intelligence gathering - now that they know who the important operatives are, you go backwards using video and see where they went and who they talked to.
          • throwaway81523 2y ago
            Seems easier to install a transmitter and GPS in the supposedly receive-only device. Then it could actually track people and show where they had been. It could store up readings and only transmit while the device was in motion at around walking speed, with signal strength above Y. That means the person was probably outdoors and moving, thus probably ot being swept by bug detectors. Well maybe not any more, now that everyone is thinking that way ;).
• kranke155 2y ago
  Someone will eventually spill the beans on how it was done. They always do.
  • underdeserver 2y ago
    30 years from now, maybe.
  • nashashmi 2y ago
    It is a well known hack.
  • xenospn 2y ago
    [flagged]
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• akira2501 2y ago
  [flagged]
• sph 2y ago
  > You have to hand it to them Given the context and peculiar choice of words, this reminds me of a classic @dril tweet https://x.com/dril/status/831805955402776576?s=46 https://x.com/dril/status/831805955402776576?s=46
  • rendang 2y ago
    TBH, I would "hand it to" any group who pulled off this particular attack, even ISIL.
• tootie 2y ago
  > minimal casualties We'll see about that. Some of the footage indicates the targets were all just out and about in public. I think it's likely there will be collateral damage. I assume it didn't happen since it's not being reported, but what if one of them was on a plane?
  • anvuong 2y ago
    I doubt you can receive any signal on the plane. In the airport maybe.
• aqme28 2y ago
  > minimal casualties outside of your enemy. "Thousands injured." I'm not convinced it was as super-targeted as you claim.
  • pdabbadabba 2y ago
    FWIW, Hezbollah has thousands of members. From Wikipedia [1]: > Hezbollah does not reveal its armed strength. The Dubai-based Gulf Research Centre estimated in 2006 that Hezbollah's armed wing comprises 1,000 full-time Hezbollah members, along with a further 6,000–10,000 volunteers.[200] According to the Iranian Fars News Agency, Hezbollah has up to 65,000 fighters.[201] In October 2023, Al Jazeera cited Hezbollah expert Nicholas Blanford as estimating that Hezbollah has at least 60,000 fighters, including full-time and reservists, and that it had increased its stockpile of missiles from 14,000 in 2006 to about 150,000. And this is just the armed portion. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezbollah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezbollah
    • cryptonector 2y ago
      Israel probably knows from the number of pagers ordered (and probably from spying on their pages' contents, since if you're going to mount this sophisticated a supply-chain attack to plant bombs in a device, you might as well also plant spyware) just how many active members Hezbollah has [or had, since many of them are now inactive members].
  • CydeWeys 2y ago
    You underestimate how many members Hezbollah has, and also, how unreliable these kinds of initial reports tend to be.
• captainkrtek 2y ago
  > You have to hand it to them -- it's a clever strategy with minimal casualties outside of your enemy I agree it’s clever, but there are reports now of thousands wounded. Feels like a lot of collateral risk, if these people who were targeted were out and about (grocery shopping, bank, etc.)
  • ignoramous 2y ago
    Looks like Lebanese civilians have indeed been injured/maimed; but it appears cool to some since it is an "impressive supply-chain hack", so let's leave it at that and not call it terrorism.
    • csmpltn 2y ago
      You could've labeled it terrorism had Lebanon and Israel weren't at war with each other over the past 12 months, and had the people carrying those devices were random uninvolved civilians. If you were to consider the fact that Hezbollah has been shelling Israeli cities and civilians on a daily basis for the past 12 months (killing many, also children, and driving hundreds of thousands of people out of their homes), with the UN peacekeeping force failing to keep Hezbollah north of the Litani river - then perhaps you would understand that this is likely as close as you can get to a "precision strike" on an enemy you're at war with. This may in-fact be the most precise military strike on an enemy paramilitary group in the history of modern warfare. You either have a very unrealistic idea of what a war actually looks like (0% civilians casualties or injuries), or an agenda.
      • ignoramous 2y ago
        Let's just say, I don't believe war is a cover for terrorism against any peoples, be it in the West or East, Arab or Caucasian.
        • csmpltn 2y ago
          Fair enough, and thanks for being open about this. With this in mind, all I can say is that your original comment is based on 100% emotion and 0% analysis and rationality.
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 2y ago
  >You've just injured and identified most of your enemies, incapacitated them, completely broken their communication network and effectively given you weeks of disarray to do whatever you want to further disrupt them. And affected their recruitment. Because of how pagers are worn, a significant number of injuries are going to be genital injuries. Given, that your primary recruits are young men, that is important. In that demographic, the young men may actually fear non-lethal genital injuries more than they actually fear death.
• worik 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • jnmandal 2y ago
    Less targeted than even a car bomb would be. I can't think of a precedent really.
  • csmpltn 2y ago
    Call it whatever you like, I don't care - but what do you do when the other side is out to wipe your country completely and has zero regard for any conventions of war? Hezbollah has willingly waged a war on Israel 12 months ago. The Lebanese government is complicit in not managing to hold Hezbollah back, and so do the UN peacekeeping forces which have been unable to implement resolution 1701. There have been countless of attempts at diplomacy with Hezbollah and Lebanon during this time, but nothing worked. So what would you do in this case?
    • marcusverus 2y ago
      If my best idea was setting off thousands of explosions in public places, I think maybe I'd keep brainstorming.
      • csmpltn 2y ago
        Well, I'm asking again, what is your best idea then? Face it - you'd just sit there and get slaughtered, right? Contemplating your morals and war conventions until every last citizen of your country has been butchered? Waiting for some imaginary court and international peacekeeping forces to come and help you, only to die waiting? Those were thousands of targeted explosions, by the way. There are videos of bystanders, standing in close proximity to the explosions themselves and not getting hurt. Why are you being so flippant?
        • worik 2y ago
          > ... what is your best idea then Justice
• jnmandal 2y ago
  > Hack the backend server, send a coordinated page to all the pagers at the same time. I worked on these before and I don't think you'd need to hack anything at all to send a page. Its just a broadcast. Especially if you had access to the receiver as they seem to have had, I can't imagine they compromised the actual Hezbollah transmission tower.
  • CydeWeys 2y ago
    Yeah I mean it's basically just like mass-sending a spam text, no? All they need to know is the phone numbers of the pagers. Or even just the number range from which the pager numbers were assigned, and then spam the entire range. Spammers have simple enough software that can do all this; it doesn't seem like a sticking point for Mossad.
    • Crosseye_Jack 2y ago
      It Depends... Sure you could spam the pager system triggering them one by one, but because how pagers work you could trigger them all at the same time. Pagers are basically just a receiver of a One-to-Many network. A pager will receive all pages being broadcast as they are "listen only" devices. As the pagers don't talk back to the service provider the SP doesn't know which transmitter to use, so the SP will broadcast the pages out across their whole network. The circuity/software of the pager will then filter out only the messages intended for that pager out of all the pages it receives. To reach pagers out of range/switched off the SP would just repeat the page for a period of time. (note: for message privacy you can add encryption to the message but back in the day that didn't happen, and you could just pull clear text out of the air.) This "receiver only" style of device allowed pagers to be low power and would run for a very long time on a single AAA battery (or even on a watch battery, because they built a pager into a watch! The Timex Beepwear... Oh I so wanted one as a kid!). But it has the benefit that because they are one-way/"listen only" you can't track them because they are not communicating back to the mothership! It would be like trying to track an AM/FM radio in a car. If you are adding an "add-on board" to the device, you could tap the receiver of the pager and do your own decoding of the pages. So you could have the add-on board trigger on a "certain message for this pager only" but you could also trigger on "a certain message sent to pager serial 1234567890". If you knew the phone number assigned to the pager with the serial 1234567890 (because you just so happened to have paid for service for that pager by what ever clandestine means you wanted) you could trigger them all with a single phone call from a public phone or a disposable cell phone to a pager not even associated to the target group of devices. EDIT: Just a note to say 2 way pagers do exist, this type of pager allows the pager to confirm receipt of a page and even send their own pages to other pagers, but I would suspect that the type of pager being used in this case is the one-way type pager because its reported they were using them because they are harder to track.
• nashashmi 2y ago
  I dont think you have to hand it to them. I just think that they have to know who the people are. And a code has to be uploaded to the pagers that cause the explosion. There have been several presentations on this before. It was for old cell phones.
• bigtoe416 2y ago
  The shell company isn't a strict requirement, and I'd wager less likely. Infiltrating the delivery process would be easier and would instead require knowing about the pager purchase and being able to swap the actual package for an alternative package. Theoretically all of this is possible with some data interception to discover the pager order, a team to construct the exploding pagers, a person to deliver the exploding pagers, and a person to intercept the actual pagers (which could be the same person delivering the exploding pagers).
• whoitwas 2y ago
  Minimal what? They just indiscriminately bombed anyone near anyone with this branded pager. It's really disgusting to see you marveling at mass civilian destruction or terrorism.