Let’s talk about the pager attack against Hezbollah

[thewayne]

First off, this was a nation-state supply chain attack. It was pretty obviously carried off by Israel, and demonstrated that they have a person inside Hezbollah’s organization. They either saw the order for replacing all the pagers being put together, or possibly did a persuasion campaign and caused the order for the pagers to come together. Then at some point in the manufacturing/delivery chain the order was intercepted and all the devices were modified.

The company that sold them is just a branding company in Taipei. They were made in Hungary, the home of Viktor Orban, friend to and also deep in the pockets of Uncle Vlad in Moscow. The company that made them may well be a shell company as the “corporate HQ” address is a residential house with pieces of paper in the window and the person who answered the house said it’s just a mail drop for a number of companies, much like a certain address in Delaware. The president or CEO of the company, when reached, said ‘We didn’t make them’.

The pagers were modified with a small amount of a plastique explosive compound and a detonator, rigged to trigger on the receipt of a coded signal. And yesterday afternoon, the signal was sent, killing a dozen people and maiming quite a number more. It isn’t clear if it was a group page or a broadcast signal from another transmitter. At least three children among the dead. Several Hezbollah members who had been issued the pagers noticed they were getting hot, took them off and threw them away.

The pagers themselves were ruggedized with a rechargeable battery designed to last a few weeks between charges. There are advantages to pagers, believe it or not. They’re still heavily used in hospitals because the transmitters will get a signal through the heavy radiation-shielded walls reliably. They’re also normally receive-only devices, so you can’t trace a person’s movement with them, convenient for people who don’t want to be traced. So they’re still in use around the world, but not nearly in the numbers that they were in the pre-smart phone era. In an area like the Middle East that may have shaky telecoms, a pager might be a reliable communications device.


That was Tuesday. Today is Wednesday, and another surge of mass device bombings has taken place.

It's been reported that thousands of walkie talkies used by Hezbollah in Lebanon have blown up, resulting in more deaths, lots more injuries, and massive property damage. And the deaths were not confined to Lebanon, there were also reports of deaths and injuries in Syria. It was also reported that some solar panels exploded.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bc-ml-lebanon-israel-exploding-pagers-hungary-firm_n_66eab9b2e4b00648275b59ef

https://today.lorientlejour.com/article/1427496/recap-14-killed-almost-3000-injured-in-latest-toll-from-pager-blasts.html

Comments

[prixmium]

Thanks for sharing this! Found it on the "latest things" page. You explained things in a factual manner that shares who is ultimately responsible but doesn't weigh down my soul with all the evils of the world. Appreciate it.

[thewayne]

It's pretty heavy stuff and definitely weighs on me.

[marahmarie]

This.

Not that I thought a single piece of tech in existence was "safe" anyhow - this just proves none of it is, and proves how easy it is to make any type of it unsafe.

Scary stuff.

[thewayne]

Well, yes and no.  It would be extremely hard to plant explosives like that in an iPhone, for example.  Steve Jobs famously had an interaction with the team during the development of the original iPod.  He told them to shrink the design.  They said they couldn't.  He threw it in a fish tank.  Air bubbles escaped.  He said 'Where there's bubbles, there's airspace.  Shrink it.'  In a small smart phone, it would be extremely hard to implant explosives and a detonator and get it back together intact.  A pager and walkie-talkie are built to be larger to be easier to handle, not to be as small and thin as possible.

[marahmarie]

I mean yes, my first thought (before seeing your post) was, "Well, there's space in older tech for that". I had a similar thought about iPhones and Android phones not being quite so fit for purpose. I agree the space is probably just not there, though I see overheating the battery via malware as one potential workaround.

Or as one article said, they could try half battery/half explosive on the manufacturing side.

The thing is, just because as the article points out, phones are too tightly packed to be much good for this purpose right now, doesn't mean things won't change with quantum computing and new, currently experimental technologies on the rise.

Phones are too packed now because batteries, RAMs, CPUs and GPUs are old-school. With smaller form factors and evolving tech around shrinking things down this could eventually become an issue if phones stay big while parts get smaller.

[richardf8]

I cannot help but think Ismail Haniyeh may have been the first to get this message.

[white_aster]

I'd wondered on the technicalities of it, if it was some kind of induced glitch that made batteries explode. If they think it's just "someone stuck a bomb in every device in that order", then yeah, wow.

[disneydream06]

WOWZA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Doesn't sound like things are quieting down over there. :o
Hugs, Jon

[armiphlage]

It's odd that they staggered the walkie-talkie and pager detonations, instead of triggering everything at once. You'd expect that, once it was clear that the supply chain had been exploited, people would have discarded or disassembled everything procured with a Hezbollah credit card or purchase order, or delivered to an address associated with them.

If electronics can contain bombs, your coffee mugs can contain polonium, and the ink in the pens from your office supplies can contain dimethylmercury.

[acelightning73]

This was obviously something dreamed up by Mossad (Israeli secret service). It's the kind thing they like to do. Confuse the enemy - put them off guard with something so unimaginable nobody believes you did it.

[thewayne]

Absolutely Mossad.  The CIA has done similar things with intercepting printers and routers bound for certain countries, pulling them aside, altering ROMs and such implanting spyware.  But as far as we know, not implanting explosives.  StuxNet was a whole different thing.

[acelightning73]

Mossad has sold a lot of their nastier tricks to the KGB.

[silveradept]

And, of course, when the inevitable part of noncombatant casualties and fatalities happen from this, as they have, there will be much blame saying "well, if they didn't want to die, they shouldn't have been part of Hezbollah," and in the retaliation, there will be "well, if they didn't want to die, then they shouldn't have elected Bibi," and there will be a lot of people dead because people who believed they knew better justified it to themselves that there are some people who do not get the affordance of being human.

This is one of those places where I wish the U.S.'s hegemonic power were put to better uses, to stop the cycle of violence, rather than to overtly cheer on the violence.

[thewayne]

Yeah, the unending cycle of violence.  It's pretty tragic.

[arlie]

But how could they stop the violence, other than by violence of their own?

Put another way - I'll settle for them stopping enabling violence, and committing their own.

I don't want them playing universal paladin - their track record when they do interfere is horrendous. Possibly their last halfway just intervention was World War II.

[silveradept]

A valid criticism - the US does jump to violence as the solution to everything. I was going for something more like what you will settle for - stop enabling violence elsewhere, stop committing violence elsewhere. There are presumably several levers that could be used that are not encouraging or enabling violence, but I suspect many of then have third rail status because advocating for Israel to stop violence is almost always transformed into anti-Semitism or "hating Jews."