Experts: Lebanon Pager Explosions Likely Not Lithium Batteries Alone
Both Wiens and MG said a supply-chain attack in which a remote-triggered explosive was surreptitiously placed into the pagers before they were distributed is more likely. There is precedent for this: in 1996, Israel put a bomb inside of a cell phone and used it to kill Yahya Ayyash, who was then a bomb maker for Hamas.
https://www.404media.co/experts-lebanon-pager-explosions-likely-not-lithium-batteries-alone/Open linkView original on lemmy.sdf.org
Well yeah, specially since the Apollo Gold pagers don't use lithium batteries.
What I find most concerning is that a large number of people/journalists considered it plausible to blow up a (edit: stock standard) pager remotely via some hack or zero day.
The war crimes are expected.
It's plausible. If the pager had some kind of battery that could explode if charged, discharged, or shorted in some way, and the controller could be compromised, then it'd be possible to make it explode.
Remember, Israel worked on the Stuxnet attack that destroyed Iranian uranium centrifuges by infecting their controllers, making them go too fast, and destroying themselves.
But they didn't because materials that explode like that simply aren't used as batteries.
Further, software is not magic. In consumer electronics basic power management is done entirely by hardware. A hack cannot short out the battery, because the circuit to do that simply doesn't exist. Maybe the hack could cause enough of a sustained power draw to overheat the battery and trigger a failure eventually, but that would still look quite different from what we saw.
Call them Li-Ion batteries to prevent confusion with lithium batteries such as CR-2032, which probably have been used in pagers.
Well, that’s terrorism right there. Wish I lived in a country that had a problem with such awfulness.
Sounds like one of the things mentioned in the Edward Snowden leaks
What a fresh new hell this is.
There are pictures and videos of the aftermath, and they make it pretty obvious that it wasn't lithium batteries alone.
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