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.
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.
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.
