I will be very surprised if these exploding pagers turn out to be "it was the batteries".

ive destroyed a BUNCH of lipo packs. ive flown them into trees at high speed, ive stabbed them to watch them sputter and flame. Lipos can cause problems, sure, but lipo batteries, especially tiny ones that could go in pagers, simply dont have the oomph to explode hard enough to kill people

these had to have been mossadded somehow

regular batteries do not do this.
they are MADE not to
because consumers

and the batteries i did explode?
they were easily 20-50x bigger than the ones that go in pagers (a single AA, usually)

now is it possible mossad swapped the batteries for 'ones that were intentionally boobytrapped to explode'? maybe

but sending a page to a pager doesnt magically do anything special unless you backdoor the pager somehow too.

how does a pager 'work for months and months, but then ... explode'? You have to tell it to handle a specific page a different way.

so we're talking about backdoored whole pagers

@Viss all at the same time as well.

@FishermansEnemy that recent fbi sting where they got backdoored phones into the hands of thousands of criminals comes to mind

remember this?
the anom phones, that the fbi sold to criminals who used them for months and months?

this is what im thinking.
theres no magical way to send a page to a pager and have it explode.

@Viss a wall st journal story stated the pagers were very recently received and distributed to operatives.

watch your supply chain, rookies!

@h2onolan yes. this. exactly this.

@Viss So why blow a 'zero day' equivalent now, on what? Seems an odd time to play that card.

@steely_glint im betting that it was a supply chain attack, and they were handed backdoored pagers. i dont think there were any exploits used here

@Viss sure - what I meant was why now - it's the kind of thing you get to do once every 10+ years - so why 'waste' it? Or is something afoot?

@steely_glint israel blowing up hezbollah soldiers? i think they just wanted to do a two-fer: 1) blow up some people they dont like 2) make everyone afraid of telcom equipment by showing off they can inject shit into hezbollas supply chain

@Viss I'm also not that sure whether it's even possible to backdoor a pager firmware-wise to short-circuit its battery... the microcontroller ought to have some maximum power consumption by design well below the maximum current of the battery, and i think it's improbably that the other components could somehow be firmware-rigged to do that (what are you going to do with the LCD? turn up brightness?)

@ammoniumperchlorate for that kind of volume? almost 3000 units? it had to be a simple hack.

@Viss There could be, if they're designed to respond to multiple sets of tones.
E.g. each pager has one set that sets off the beep / vibrate, and another, "unused" set that triggers an embedded explosive.

@tim_lavoie there are several ways i can think of to make something like this happen

@Viss Look I'm just as clueless as you are about this

@ammoniumperchlorate well i know what its NOT. its not a lipo explosion, thats for sure

@Viss I agree that it wasn't a simple Li ion explosion thing, but then why do we have reports about the pagers heating up before exploding? (see e.g. AP). As I see it we have two options:

- it was a bunch of regular batteries that were mossaded to explode instead of non-violently pop when overheating (for instance by giving them stronger casing). in that case, how were they short-circuited with pager hardware?

- the batteries were partially replaced with actual explosive charges 1/2

@ammoniumperchlorate cite sources please

@Viss pagers heating up: https://apnews.com/article/lebanon-hezbollah-israel-exploding-pagers-8893a09816410959b6fe94aec124461b , 4th paragraph
https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/09/8-dead-2700-injured-after-simultaneous-pager-explosions-in-lebanon/ , 4th last paragraph

the rest is my hobbyist knowledge about microcontrollers

@ammoniumperchlorate its possible that they used a coil or something similar to heat up a fuse or to trigger the chemical reaction. will have to investigate whether semtex or c4 or something can be triggered in that way. c4, definitely not, it needs a blasting cap. semtex, i dunno

@ammoniumperchlorate @Viss
That is the part I can accept - that the particular brand of pagers was relying on firmware to prevent battery abuse, and a hack was discovered to bypass the firmware protection and expose the lack of hardware protection.

But that results in thousands of ruined pagers, and probably a few minor injuries and some house fires, not multiple deaths and thousands of injuries requiring urgent hospital treatment.

@dragonfrog @ammoniumperchlorate these have to have been backdoored pagers with real actual explosives in.

@ammoniumperchlorate @Viss ‘Another possibility is an electronic pulse “that was sent from afar and burnt the devices and caused their explosion,” said Yehoshua Kalisky, a scientist and senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies, a Tel Aviv think tank.’

An electronic pulse burning the devices from afar. My brain hurts. I hope that it’s just a stupid translation and a stupid reporter.

@chris @ammoniumperchlorate but 3000 pagers all at the same time?
unlikely

@Viss @dragonfrog Oh, I just came up with another idea: The microcontroller software might have been rigged to apply DC to the pager buzzer - depending on the magnetic speaker type that might drain enough current to sufficiently heat up the battery

but then again, you'd probably use piezo elements in a low cost pager, and that wouldn't work with them

@ammoniumperchlorate @dragonfrog this is not how science works

@Viss @ammoniumperchlorate Yes, that’s utter nonsense.
The only plausible explanation is that the #pagers have been modified to detonate a small explosive when receiving a specific signal.
I‘m curious if todays’ event was triggered on purpose.

@chris @ammoniumperchlorate dude, it was mossad.

see.

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cwyl9048gx8t

I did a bit of research.
my guess is either HMTD or TATP.
those can be triggered via heat, and its plausible to build a teeny tiny pipe bomb the size of a battery, and power the pager with an adjacent tiny 3.7v lipo.

but this is 100% speculation, based on the reports and the video

@Viss there's a bunch of weirdness in these specs so if you can do something basic like trigger a unique alarm then a hardware trigger can sense that. But of course if you're already modifying hardware then it's easy enough to change software so it doesn't really make a big difference either way

see?
not the battery.
(nailed it)

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/09/17/world/israel-hamas-war-news?unlocked_article_code=1.LU4.yQNN.lrxL0ef79K2O&smid=url-share

@Viss They called up Mikko for that story! Big guns.

@Sempf i havent talked to that guy in forever

@Viss Met him once, smart dood.

@Sempf he used to reference my tweets, years ago, on stage, and i'd wake up and see a few dozen brand new finnish followers because i made some shodan post that he used a screenshot of. he invited me to t2 in finland once, and i thought it was a good time, but they complained my talk 'wasnt technical enough' (?!!?) and i wasnt invited back and shortly after he unfollowed me and hasnt spoken to me since. no clue wtf happened behind the scenes

@Viss lots of dead space in those units. used to know a guy that hid his weed in a Motorola Advisor

@Viss Wow! Weird turnarounds.

@Sempf yeah, no clue wtf, and that was like... 4-5 years ago? before the plague

nup. it was PETN.

TIL

https://flipboard.com/video/aljazeera/913a352eda
3 grams of PETN was used
and its possible to trigger it with the pagers circuitry.

it took 3 months to man in the middle 5000 pagers