WTF is happening with this pager attack?

[johnnyharris]

FYI: there was a previous version of this that I deleted. Graphic imagery made it so it was age restricted which means it would reach like ten percent the audience. So I took that out and reuploaded I didn’t change anything else in the video. Just took out the actual clip of the explosion which I probably for the better. It’s pretty upsetting.
-Johnny

[melissareiter]

My guess is this was a long term set-up where in Hezbollah was sold on the idea of pagers by someone "working for the other side." The pagers they bought were made specifically for this purpose.

[bestman]

As an electronics engineer, I can say with certainty that this wasn’t a software malware that caused this. These were physically modified pagers which contained small explosives.

Edit: To further clarify, the components inside the pagers (Li battery, capacitors, etc) WILL NOT cause any significant explosion, if any, even if they were “hacked”. They opened these pagers and put explosives in them.

[PBRStreetgang]

A company named Apollo Gold licenced their name to a Hungarian company named BAC, this company sold the pagers allegedly. It is alleged that Mossad put a tiny chipboard next to the battery that had 3 grams of explosive. This was allegedly done during the manufacturing of the pagers.

[blackturbine]

They were definitely modified.
It's impossible to make it explode not even by shorting a battery as battery management system would prevent any overload or short.

[FWtravels]

It’s like that one mission in GTA. The tech bro is on stage when his phone rings, he says hello and it explodes in his face.

[MarkWatsonY]

Supply chain attacks for physical devices was something mentioned in Snowden leaks. But previously it was installing chips to hack phones or computers before they reached their destination, something the NSA has been capable of for a while. Putting explosives in a device seems super risky, because of detection. But apparently it worked well this time, but at the same time burns the idea for the future unless there’s some sneaky way to hide it.

[nblank]

Just a reminder that Johnny is not suicidal. If he stops posting, we'd know.

To you Johnny, you are one of the very few journalist who do actual journalism, which I can trust. BIG Thanks for that and I wish that more people like you emerge.

[marksmith]

That sounds like a Tom Clancy novel. Masada is so badass. Hell of a job they did.

[hnwi]

Today the walkie talkies went off ! Israel on some high level shit.

[shamsiddinnabiev]

I can imagine the medias reaction if it was carried out in Israel against IDF, it would clearly portrayed as a terrorist attack

[shadow_spark]

Galaxy Note 7 part 2: Electric boogaloo

[CLIPS_]

Please talk more about the atrocities that are happening in Sudan!

[VicTeamss]

Intimidation act. Showing secret service are everywhere

[KingofROFLMAO]

No mention of the kids and health care workers killed and injured in these terrorist attacks as well?

[AnonymousBrt]

Pagers are used by many in Lebanon including Medical workers.

[Ciphrzer]

As a software engineer, it makes total sense that a pager would be less secure than a phone. You could spin up a non-google version of Android and that has decades of security hardening. A beeper has custom low level software probably written 30 years ago, barely any fixes or security priority, because security on a beeper was NEVER important and nobody has used them for 20 years. It does seem like a gross design oversight if the software can modify voltage outputs or whatever was necessary to pull this off. That shouldn't be possible with good hardware design.

[plokijuh]

Weird how they could pull that off but not prevent what happened in October

[animalnt]

11 people died, 2 kids and 2 healthcare workers, maimed thousands of people

[basdfgwe]

It's not lithium batteries, pagers were using normal nickel batteries. They had put other explosives into it.