4 ms·
so how does one verify that the battery in their iphone doesn't contain explosives?
by clueless 2y ago
so how does one verify that the battery in their iphone doesn't contain explosives?
- tptacek 2y agoThe supply chain for an iPhone is much stronger than for a Gold Alpha pager, and it's likely that the same thing will end up being true of these ICOM radios: they'll turn out to be designed and branded by ICOM, but actually manufactured and distributed by some random Eastern European outfit that paid to use ICOM as a skinsuit. That would never happen with an Apple device.
- rmbyrro 2y ago> The supply chain for an iPhone is much stronger Probably not strong enough to make it unreachable by a sophisticated agency like the Mossad.
- tptacek 2y agoI think the most likely outcome here is that all these devices were intercepted from the same firm.
- borski 2y agoWith enough time, effort, and money? Sure. But that would be many orders of magnitude more difficult that what they pulled off here, which was already very impressively difficult to pull off.
- ianburrell 2y agoIt is likely that they were authentic Icom devices. My understanding is that it is common for commercial radios to be programmed by distributor. Or Gold Alpha gave a good deal on pagers and radios and then were intercepted from warehouse. I don't think Icom would ever put name on generic radio, they make all their radios in Japan. It is like Toyota putting name on another car.
- borski 2y agoToyota puts their engines in other cars all the time.
- toast0 2y agoThere's lots of Toyotas in this list[1] in both directions. Toyota is happy to build cars with other people's names on them, as well as put their name on a car someone else built. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_badge-engineered_vehicles https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_badge-engineered_veh...
- ianburrell 2y agoI read that Icom V82 is discontinued and most available are counterfeit.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tamimio 2y agoReplace it.
- shmatt 2y agoAs long as it doesn’t say “made in Hungary” And on a more serious note. Hizbolla is a blacklisted terrorist org, they can’t just order stuff from regular factories. Buying from an anonymous white label factory in Hungary with no address and little information is probably pretty normal from them - because anyone doing business with them in the EU will go to jail As long as you’re not buying electronics from shady factories with no known owners you’ll be fine
- beeboobaa3 2y agoIsrael has shown us (again) that we cannot trust any device whose full supply chain hasn't been properly audited. Which you can't really do at this scale. So yeah, literally anything you buy can apparently just be stuffed full of explosives waiting to kill you and anyone near you.
- hersko 2y agoYes. Explosives can be placed in any device that has a small cavity. This has always been true....
- beeboobaa3 2y agoIt just hasn't been likely.
- vlovich123 2y agoThe mechanism of action is unclear at this time. I’ve seen it written that the explosives were part of PCBs with electronics that mimicked the original.
- colechristensen 2y agoIt was an addon board with explosives on it which was attached to the existing normal circuit board.
- xnx 2y agoWas there enough empty space in the device for this? Were other components removed or miniaturized?
- colechristensen 2y agoIt was a few lines in a news article, so unknown. But you can see photos of the same model of pager and it's an LCD screen in a plastic shell, the kind that seems like there would be room on the inside for a little addon board to be attached to the existing board.
- WJW 2y agoImagine if the Russians managed to do something like this in the US...
- colechristensen 2y agoX-Ray image compared to known X-Ray of the exact same model Bomb sniffing dog or chemical test of surfaces
- tptacek 2y agoAllegedly hidden well enough that a casual X-ray of the pager wouldn't have revealed it.
- colechristensen 2y agoIt might have looked like a normal pager under xray, but I bet it looked _different_ than an unmodified pager. Not suspicious on its own but suspicious because it was changed.
- geysersam 2y agoInteresting that it wasn't discovered by any bomb sniffing dog in Lebanon. They had thousands of devices. There must be at least a few bomb dogs in Lebanon right?
- Zironic 2y agoBomb sniffing dogs can't detect every explosive compound under the sun. They're trained on some of the most common ones but there are almost infinite variations of explosive chemistries.
- clueless 2y ago"According to Sky News Arabia; Mossad was able to Inject a Compound of Pentaerythritol Tetranitrate (PETN) into the Batteries of the New Encrypted Pagers that Hezbollah began using around February, before they even arrived in the Hands of Hezbollah Members, allowing them to Remotely Overheat and Detonate the Lithium Battery within the Device."
- Aerroon 2y agoIf that's true, then does that make electric vehicles into potential car bombs if "the right thing" is injected into the battery?
- TiredOfLife 2y agoDon't be a part of a terrorist organization and if you are - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bring_your_own_device https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bring_your_own_device
- rasz 2y agoStart with "do I work for Terrorist organization?"
- this_user 2y agoWell, are you a member of a terrorist group? If no, then odds are that nobody is going to go through the trouble of adding explosives to your phone's battery. In this case the people responsible must have discovered where these terrorists were buying their devices. Since basically no one except for them was buying large quantities of these, they were easy to target.
- mrguyorama 2y agoHave you angered Mossad? If no, you are almost certainly fine. If yes, you are already dead. James Mickens explained this clearly a decade ago. https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf You cannot answer any security questions without a threat model. Are you worried about your neighbor putting a bomb in your phone? Mossad isn't putting bombs in random phones.