Pagers explode across Lebanon in attack targeting Hezbollah members

finickydesert , 3 hours ago

90’s to early 00’s style attack. Still a deplorable way to strike.

yogthos OP , 3 hours ago

Interestingly, given just how compromised smart phones are at this point, a pager has now become a far safer means of communication.

wildbus8979 , 2 hours ago

Traditionally pagers use either FLEX or POCSAG protocols, both of which are fully unencrypted and have to broadcast everywhere with relatively high power… So safer is maybe a bit of a misnomer… But they also don’t transmit anything so in terms of remote listening and location tracking, yes they are safer.

yogthos OP , 2 hours ago

Right, I meant safer in terms of the device doing what you expect it to be doing. Also, pagers that support encryption are absolutely a thing.

wildbus8979 , 2 hours ago

I meant safer in terms of the device doing what you expect it to be doing

Absolutely, I’m just putting some nuance into it for people who don’t know anything about pagers.

Also, pagers that support encryption are absolutely a thing.

Fair, but it appears these were Apollo Gold A25, an off the shelf FLEX system.

yogthos OP , 1 hour ago

Yeah, in this case I’m guessing they’d just use coded messages when communicating. Ultimately, that’s even more effective since those are indistinguishable from regular messages unless you know the special meaning of the words used. So, they’re even less likely to attract attention.

i_am_not_a_robot , 1 hour ago

www.cnn.com/…/lebanon-pagers-attack-hezbollah#h_f…

How was this pulled off? Here are the theoriesFrom CNN’s Christian Edwards

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.

David Kennedy, a former US National Security Agency intelligence analyst, told CNN that the explosions seen in videos shared online appear to be “too large for this to be a remote and direct hack that would overload the pager and cause a lithium battery explosion.”

Kennedy said he found the second theory to be more plausible.

“It’s more likely that Israel had human operatives… in Hezbollah… The pagers would have been implanted with explosives and likely only to detonate when a certain message was received,” he said.

“The complexity needed to pull this off is incredible. It would have required many different intelligence components and execution. Human intelligence (HUMINT) would be the main method used to pull this off, along with intercepting the supply chain in order to make modifications to the pagers,” he added.

AOCapitulator , 1 hour ago

So did they just make bombs disguised inside pagers and hope that their enemies bought them instead of like, normal people and doctors and shit or??

yogthos OP , 1 hour ago

I’m guessing they managed to insert themselves into the supply chain and installed the bombs that way. It does look like it was fairly indiscriminate though.

krolden , 5 minutes ago

Probably overloaded the battery with a firmware hack