by Brian Shilhavy, Health Impact News:
September 17, 2024 may go down as one of the most infamous days in history, as an unprecedented cyberattack was carried out against people in Lebanon and Syria earlier today, by simultaneously detonating thousands of pagers that blew up remotely killing several people, and injuring thousands.
Most of the victims targeted were members of Hezbollah, but many innocent people were also attacked.
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BEIRUT (AP) — Pagers used by hundreds of members of the militant group Hezbollah exploded near simultaneously in Lebanon and Syria on Tuesday, killing at least nine people – including an 8-year-old girl — and wounding several thousand, officials said. They blamed Israel in what appeared to be a sophisticated, remote attack.
Among those wounded was Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon.
The pagers that exploded had been newly acquired by Hezbollah after the group’s leader ordered members to stop using cell phones, warning they could be tracked by Israeli intelligence.
A Hezbollah official told The Associated Press the pagers were a new brand the group had not used before.
At about 3:30 p.m. local time on Tuesday, pagers started heating up and then exploding in the pockets and hands of those carrying them — particularly in a southern Beirut suburb and the Beqaa region of eastern Lebanon where Hezbollah has a strong presence, and in Damascus, where several Hezbollah members were wounded, Lebanese security officials and a Hezbollah official said.
The Hezbollah official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press. (Source.)
At the time of this writing, there are two main theories about how Israel was able to pull off this historic attack.
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. (Source.)
The U.S. Government has distanced itself from having any prior knowledge of this attack, and at this point I tend to agree with them, because unlike previous news about major attacks in the Middle East since Oct. 7, 2023, there was no apparent immediate “standard script” that all the U.S. news services were using to explain this event, as it seemed to catch everyone off guard.
As the corporate media scrambled today to find “experts” on cyber security to help explain what just happened, the general consensus at this point is that this was caused by a supply chain interception with some kind of hardware modification that allowed them to trigger these devices remotely.
Here is a report from Forbes:
Did Israel Hack Hezbollah Pagers To Make Them Explode? Former Intel Agents Have A More Likely Explanation
Ex-IDF and NSA analysts told Forbes the attackers likely intercepted the devices, tampered with their software and turned them into explosives that can be detonated from anywhere.
Hundreds of wireless pagers exploded at the same time across Lebanon on Tuesday, leading to claims Israel could have hacked the devices of Hezbollah operatives.
But ex-intelligence analysts tell Forbes a totally remote hack is not the most likely explanation.
“Looking at the videos it seems like the explosion was way stronger than anything that could be potentially made by a regular [computing] chip,” said one former IDF agent, asking to remain anonymous because of their prior affiliation with Israel intelligence.
A more likely scenario, the agent said, is that devices were intercepted prior to delivery and outfitted with explosives and software that would detonate them when they received a trigger message. Cybersecurity researcher and former NSA analyst Patrick Wardle, now CEO of security firm DoubleYou, said it would not have been particularly difficult to do this.
“Given physical access to electronics, it is trivial to surreptitiously modify the device,” he told Forbes.
He noted that unless someone opened up the pagers, “nothing would be seen as amiss.”
“It’s basically putting a bomb into a device and connecting with a software-based trigger,” Wardle said, citing 2014 research that he’d carried out with another young hacker, showing Nest Dropcams could be made to explode at a facial recognition match with easily obtained explosive material and detonator chip.
“This was in 2014… so if two kids could pull this off, imagine what a real intelligence agency could do.”
(Source.)
Samsung Galaxy Cell phone that blew up. Image source.
While the most likely explanation of how this happened is that these pagers were altered before people started using them, and that it is not possible to remotely hack existing mobile devices and just blow them up, that doesn’t mean that this event today is unlikely to happen again, or that this could not happen in the United States.
First of all, lithium ion batteries are notorious for blowing up and burning. This has been happening accidentally for at least 20 years now.
Here is a report from CBS in October of 2004, twenty years ago:
Exploding Cell Phones Spur Recalls
Curtis Sathre said it was like a bomb going off. His 13-year-old son Michael stood stunned, his ears ringing, hand gushing blood and body covered in black ash.
In a split second last August, fragments from Michael’s exploding cell phone had hit him between the eyes and lodged in the ceiling of the family’s home in Oceanside, Calif.
Over the past two years, federal safety officials have received 83 reports of cell phones exploding or catching fire, usually because of incompatible, faulty or counterfeit batteries or chargers.
Burns to the face, neck, leg and hip are among the dozens of injury reports the agency has received. (Source.)
In 2016 through 2017, Samsung recalled 2.5 million of its Galaxy Note 7s because their lithium batteries were exploding on people. See:
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