this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2024
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Is this a cyberattack, or pre-planted explosives?
My dad used to have one and it runs on single AA bsttery. It will burn if exploded but I doubt will that make "man fell on the groud bleeding." Newer models might use recharable batteries, yet the BMC (logically thinking) should be sperated from the communication part as charging have nothing to do with it. How are you going to use SMS to hack a part of the system which isn't connected?
If it is pre-planted explosives, that's just wet work and nothing to talk about it.
Of course, the attacker can do a supply chain attack (by threating/hacking the manufacture, excluding explosives) as a stage to make the cyberattack possible.
NYT has a link up which it claims has been verified. It is a video of someone at a market who had one of these in their messenger bag. The video shows a decent size explosion, which blew a big hole in the bag and knocked the guy to the ground.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/09/17/world/israel-hamas-war-news/44771255-fd1d-5028-8228-aff0ca5b8139
I doubt you could make an explosion that big with a AA battery. They must have planted the stuff in some massive supply chain hack.
Yep, all the electrical engineers who have chimed in say it looks more like explosives.
A battery would get hot and start a fire. It wouldn't instantly explode like this.
Given how targeted the attacks were at certain people, does this imply a bunch of people walking around with explosives in their pagers, where they weren't set off because they weren't one of the targets?
NYT says this switch to pagers has been recent, after the Oct 7 attacks last year, when Hezbollah suspected that Israel was spying on the cell network, and using it to locate targets for strikes. So all these pagers got distributed to Hezbollah-affiliated people in short order . This system doesn't use commercial networks, and has been called a "closed" network by the NYT.
If all that is true, then that means anyone with one of these closed-network pagers got it from being involved with Hezbollah in the first place.
Oh wow, that's quite... something.
Yeah this is what I'm confused about. In a lot of simpler devices like this the BMS is actually a daughter board and has no physical connectivity to the main circuits at all. And even if it had access you generally do not have the capacity to rewrite its code, because again code updating is not something that was ever expected.
I cannot imagine how you'd cause this via a cyberattack. I'm sure they manipulated the devices somehow. Crazy move though. I struggled reading the first headline (not this one), because I just could not fathom that they mean actual literal pagers.
"Exploded" always sounded like an adorable kid word to me, like "He explodeded me!?"
I know its a regular and awful normal term but some things still sound funny to me
Thanks for sharing.
Sort of telling how you can teach people to associate good thoughts with awful things. Conditioning is a bitch.