https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/lebanon-pagers-attack-hezbollah/index.html
At least nine people are dead and around 2,800 injured in Lebanon in an attack targeting the pagers of Hezbollah members, the Lebanese health minister said. Follow our live updates.
I've got $1 that says that this was a supply chain attack. LiPo batteries tend to fart fire when they overheat, not explode, and not wth enough force to blow holes in people.
Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon was one of those injured, according to Iranian state media
What a remarkable coincidence that he happened to be in close proximity to the same type of pagers that the Hezbollah crowd was wearing.
Experts have shared two competing theories as to how hundreds of pagers could have exploded simultaneously.
One theory is that there was a cybersecurity breach, causing the pagers’ lithium batteries to overheat and detonate.
Another is that this was a “supply chain attack,” where the pagers were tampered with during the manufacturing and shipping process.
It's got to be the last one.
Makes you wonder how bulky you can make some electronics before anybody notices it's filled with C4.
It doesn't sound like the death toll is particularly high, but for sure it's put a lot of people out of action, and they're going to need a job lot of prosthetic hands.
I saw unsubstantiated reports claiming there was 10-20 grams of high explosive (eg C4). Which looks pretty "right" based on the footage I looked at before remembering this would be faces of death. An energetic "explosion" coming out the side of the pager that, combined with the metal from the batteries or the interior plates of the pager, would generate a good amount of shrapnel. So high odds of death if you were looking at your pager to read the message and almost guaranteed injury and cuts otherwise. And, if you were gripping your pager on the wrong side, likely loss of fingers (like a fire cracker in the hand).
Its one reason that a big part of securing your supply chains is to actually inspect what you purchase. (Allegedly) Israel with a few hours in a warehouse overnight could swap out a LOT of pager backplates in ways that are more or less indetectable at a glance or even picking it up (20 grams is nothing). But if you were to weigh those and realize they are 20 grams heavier than all the other pagers you bought (since packaged goods are fairly consistent), that should raise a lot of red flags.
But I am not aware of even government orgs (let alone terrorist orgs) who are willing to put the effort in to do that.
Yeah or even more in-depth than weighing them xraying devices is pretty trivial, specially a small device like a pager that fits on a dental x-ray machine.
One other interesting tidbit:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41569955
Funny enough the Apollo pagers website appears to be down.
What if the company itself was a front?
I'm not familiar with the company, but it looks like it goes way back on archive.org, so I don't think that it was a front. Might just be all the interested people hitting the website simultaneously taking it down.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/hezbollah-pagers-blast-israel-lebanon-1.7325913
What type of pager exploded?
Images of the destroyed pagers analyzed by Reuters showed a format and stickers on the back consistent with those made by Gold Apollo, a Taiwan-based pager manufacturer.
The firm did not immediately reply to questions from Reuters. Hezbollah did not reply to questions from Reuters on the make of the pagers.
TRTWorld -- not my ideal source, but I don't think that they have a reason to make anything up here -- says AAA rather than AA, but in either case, IIRC alkalines are normally intrinsically safe, can't discharge quickly enough to explode. So if it's alkaline rather than lithium, then it'd need to be be a supply chain attack:
The Alphanumeric Pager (AP-900) produced by Gold Apollo Co., Ltd. has been identified as one of the devices that exploded, killing and injuring scores in Lebanon.
At least nine people have been killed and over 2,750 others, including Hezbollah militants and medics, were injured when their paging devices exploded across Lebanon.
Speculation has emerged surrounding how the devices could have exploded and caused such high casualties, especially a pager like the AP-900 that operates on AAA alkaline batteries.
Initial investigations suggest that the pager's standard battery configuration is unlikely to be the cause of the explosions.
Instead, authorities are leaning towards the possibility that the devices were intentionally rigged with explosive materials.
If explosives were rigged inside the device before it reached Hezbollah members, it could cause such significant damage when detonated by signal.
That probably isn't good news for Hezbollah, but it's good news for me, because I'm not in a fight with some nation-state and probably am not going to wind up with explosive-rigged devices.
Gold Apollo lists AA, FWIW
Power from a single AA alkaline battery (plus lithium backup battery).
EDIT: The AP-900 uses AAA.
And yeah they absolutely are legit and are used all over the industries that still use pagers (hospitals are big big one in part because of their reliability and lack of EMI).
Another interesting point about them is that they are:
UL-certified for use in hazardous locations
Confirmed by Reuters as well: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/what-we-know-so-far-about-deadly-pager-blasts-lebanon-2024-09-17/
Images of destroyed pagers analysed by Reuters showed a format and stickers on the back that were consistent with pagers made by Gold Apollo, a Taiwan-based pager manufacturer.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DABU2Aisg_V/ (the account, SpyCraft101, is ran by Justin Black, an author and historian of espionage)
Graphic Warning: the link also contains cctv footage of some of the devices exploding and injuring/killing people.
It's like something you'd see in an action movie and think, "Yeah...but that couldn't really happen."
If Mossad have figured out a technique of remotely turning any lithium-ion battery into a bomb, then we’re about to enter very interesting times.
The question is if they did it with just the battery, or if there's some explosive device in the pagers. So it's either an unbelievable feat of logistics, or a reason for everyone in the world to think twice before carrying their phone around
Probably logistics. They had hacked the smartphones, so Hezbollah decided that they would turn to older tech that was harder to hack or intercept. But of course this presented a great opportunity, as there aren't that many maker of pagers left in the world. So the Mossad probably interdicted the delivery process to tamper with them and insert explosives.
Lithium batteries don't explode, they fizz really quickly into a flame. The incidents reported included an explosion, and in several occasions they injured not just the user but several people around them. EDIT: apparently they didn't even have Lithium batteries, just use regular alkalines. So there was no way to make them explode without inserting an explosive and rewiring the device. Alkalines also just tend to leak when they overheat, not explode. To make them explode you have to feed them with high current, which the pager doesn't have space or circuitry inside to induce that, and it is still very rare even when you do overcharge them.
I was thinking the same thing. This isn't your Nokia IED where you just wire the ringer to the detonator. There must be some additional circuitry to handle a special signal. A pre-programmed high-pitched ring for certain numbers maybe? Or a little logic chip to recognize numbers or messages?
This is an insane level of James Bond fuckery. I wonder how long that plan has been in the works
I think it's because pagers (at least one way pagers) can't be tracked.
They receive only so there's no triangulation possible.
Pagers are very common in hospital settings, they are reliable as all hell, cheap, and don't produce EMI.
quite aside from the question of how you hack thousands of pagers to make them explode, what are we carrying around in our daily lives that are one internet command away from blowing up?
You don't. If you've seen the videos this are clearly high explosives. These devices were interdicted by Mossad long ago and triggered remotely.
What's incredible to me is that this is basically guaranteed to only hit Hezbollah's command structure. 3000 hospitalized, and so far the only collateral damage is a handful of close relatives who were in cars that created as a result. That's biblical plague levels of precision strike capabilities.
For Hezbollah, this is putting over half their command staff out of the picture for a week. That's an incredible blow that will be hard for them to come back from. If Lebanon is smart, they'll use the opportunity to forcefully disarm Hezbollah.
That is very incorrect.
There is a lot of footage (some "fun" and some horrific) of pagers exploding in grocery stores and malls and the like. Because the point of the pagers was for the terrorists to be reachable outside of caves and camps.
And... there are civilians standing around in those cases. With kids who tend to have heads at waist level.
Yeah, I don't think they were the exclusive users of these pagers. I know in the US, pagers are still used by hospital staff, for example. So if a doctor with one of these pagers has one on a bus, and it explodes, it hits a doctor and a few people around them. Not necessarily any Hezbollah (who Israel really shouldn't be assassinating in the first place).
Not that Israel really cares about killing innocent people. Even beyond the current genocide, and in 1946, even before Israel existed, Irgun bombed a hotel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_David_Hotel_bombing
