~~This is nuts, from a vid I saw it was an actual explosion. The fact that so many “terrorists” were given devices with explosives in them and it was undetected until they blew…
I don’t care if it’s for the greater good, any entity that has the ability to pull this off should be dismantled and charged with crimes against humanity. This can’t be a thing humanity just accepts as a possibility. Yeah terrorism is bad but this is fucked if true.~~
Edit: if this video isn’t completely made up it looks like those batteries can explode. I was under the impression they would shoot flames well before any explosion, might not be the case. Quite curious on the exploit though. What conductor do they have in there that wouldn’t burn out like a fuse before the explosion.
One of the deaths I read was due to ammunition in their pocket and another due to them crashing their car after it exploded. Seems 8 dead, almost 3,000 injured from Lebanon to Syria and one in Qatar.
The pagers that detonated were the latest model brought in by Hezbollah in recent months, three security sources said.
I wonder if Israel has a unit similar to the NSA’s TAO (tailored access operations) where they inserted people into the manufacturing plant to tamper with devices before they even left the factory.
This is more simple than that. They’re sending a malicious payload to the target numbers which causes the pager to heat up the battery and explode. Nothing manufacturing related.
I would love to see a detailed technical explanation for how this would be possible.
I design battery-powered electronics for a living and I can’t think of any design that would let a battery explode with the violence these did, let alone on command. Unless it were deliberate.
Best I can get is figuring out a way to reuse some pins on the uc to isolate two or three caps to use as voltage pumps and then dump the whole thing at once into the battery.
I somehow suspect Electroboom is going to get a lot of new viewers in the next few days
Reading a bit more into it, seems all of them were Motorola Apollo Gold pagers (I stand corrected), so they had to have exploited the li-on charging pins to either create a loop causing thermal runaway, or spam different voltage discharging signals via their payload. Regardless, it’s a truly impressive exploit.
The newer gapollo ALA25v6 by Apollo is in Farsi and I am having trouble translating from pdf, but I found an older one for the ala25v4 in English here:
Being in IT and having worked on asics, breadboard design, lsf, dgx and others for a storage chip design company, it’s not exactly rocket science to overload a small battery so much it heats up above 140’'F/60’C that it combusts.
Same here. Like, there has to be some kind of specific vulnerability in these pagers, right? You can't just "heat up the battery," you need something that will actually use the power. If the pagers weren't compromised between the manufacturer and the recipients, then there's some major fuckery afoot.
Here’s your detailed tech possible explanation with citations:
Pagers known used in the attack were Apollo Gold AP-700, AP-900 and AP-924, which all use the same ALA25 programmable logic chip.
If you google the Gold Apollo AL-A25 Programming Manual and look for battery gauge inputs, you can see it is possible to program the voltage ranges.
By setting the battery gauge level-high to an invalid selection that is also greater than the low level it creates a bridge between the anode and cathode, resulting in thermal runaway which will in fact cause the battery to overload and explode due to the increased temperatures.
We’ve done this using similar batteries on battery backed write cache controllers sitting in a nema-3 enclosure just to see what the tolerances are.