https://x.com/zei_squirrel/status/1836179138220298558
if planting explosives in electronic devices and blowing them up in civilian areas killing and wounding indiscriminately is fine and in fact great, what's wrong with putting explosives in cars in Tel Aviv? Oh right, only genocidal occupiers are allowed to do murderous terrorism
This is terrorism, but it's ok because Israel is doing it to "bad guys".
90's to early 00's style attack. Still a deplorable way to strike.
Interestingly, given just how compromised smart phones are at this point, a pager has now become a far safer means of communication.
Traditionally pagers use either FLEX or POCSAG protocols, both of which are fully unencrypted and have to broadcast everywhere with relatively high power... So safer is maybe a bit of a misnomer... But they also don't transmit anything so in terms of remote listening and location tracking, yes they are safer.
Right, I meant safer in terms of the device doing what you expect it to be doing. Also, pagers that support encryption are absolutely a thing.
I meant safer in terms of the device doing what you expect it to be doing
Absolutely, I'm just putting some nuance into it for people who don't know anything about pagers.
Also, pagers that support encryption are absolutely a thing.
Fair, but it appears these were Apollo Gold A25, an off the shelf FLEX system.
Yeah, in this case I'm guessing they'd just use coded messages when communicating. Ultimately, that's even more effective since those are indistinguishable from regular messages unless you know the special meaning of the words used. So, they're even less likely to attract attention.
Well apparently not anymore
How was this pulled off? Here are the theories From CNN's Christian Edwards
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.
Smells like something IDF unit 8200 might have been involved with.
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