94

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works 21 points 1 day ago

Well yeah, specially since the Apollo Gold pagers don't use lithium batteries.

[-] WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world 17 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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.

[-] catloaf@lemm.ee -3 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] homura1650@lemmy.world 6 points 21 hours ago

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.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2024
94 points (100.0% liked)

World News

38554 readers
2614 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.


Lemmy World Partners

News !news@lemmy.world

Politics !politics@lemmy.world

World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world


Recommendations

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS