(Bloomberg) -- From the moment pagers began exploding across Lebanon Tuesday, theories began to circulate on how devices considered outmoded in much of the world were turned into dangerous weapons that killed several people and wounded almost 3,000.
As Lebanon accused Israel of engineering the attack aimed at Hezbollah militants, much of the debate centered on the possibility that the supply chain for the retro devices had been compromised. One prevailing idea was that the pagers had been engineered so that their batteries would heat up until the devices exploded.
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Overheating of the batteries indicated “foul play,” Lebanon’s Telecommunications Minister Johnny Corm told Bloomberg.
But one cybersecurity expert, Robert Graham, dismissed that theory. He said on X that “making batteries do anything more than burn is very hard and implausible. Far more plausible is that somebody bribed the factory to insert the explosives.”
Among the other theories was that an electronic signal triggered the explosions.
“If true, I suspect it was an intentional physical defect enabled by cyber” or a radio frequency signal, said Mark Montgomery, a retired admiral and executive director of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission.
Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television showed what it said were images of Motorola pagers that were being used before the attack. “These pagers were detonated with high-tech by the Israeli enemy,” Hezbollah lawmaker Ibrahim Mousawi told the group’s TV network.
Gold Apollo Co., a small closely-held Taiwanese company identified in some media reports as the manufacturer of the pagers that exploded, denied that it made the devices.
“Those devices aren’t ours,” said a company official, asking not to be named before a formal statement. The person added that Gold Apollo licenses its brand to at least one other company, without providing more details.
Motorola Solutions Inc. didn’t immediately respond to Bloomberg’s requests for comment.
‘Supply-Chain Deployment’
Deepa Kundur, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Toronto, said she suspects it was a “supply chain deployment.” In such an attack, she said, the perpetrator would infiltrate the pager’s upstream supply chain to manufacture a critical component with a built-in explosive charge, without the final vendor knowing. The explosive component could sit in a pager for months or years before being detonated on receipt of a message that triggers the modified part.
Pagers have been supplanted by mobile phones in much of the world, although NPR recently reported that doctors in US hospitals continue to favor their no-nonsense messaging. Pagers are also routinely used in medical facilities in Lebanon.
Hezbollah operatives use low-tech devices such as pagers and walkie-talkies to avoid interceptions of their communications by Israeli intelligence. They can send encrypted messages without giving away their location.
Israel neither confirmed nor denied it was behind the attacks. But Matthew Levitt of the Washington Institute said “it is by any definition a pretty significant intelligence coup for Israel, signifying that they penetrated Hezbollah’s security channels.”
“Israel is ratcheting things up in some ways, but they’re actually trying to send a message to Hezbollah through something short of full-scale war,” he said.
US officials said they had no advance knowledge of the exploding pagers.
Israeli Intelligence
Israeli intelligence is considered masterful at engineering such covert sabotage while never acknowledging its role.
Most famously, the Stuxnet attack, which was discovered in 2010, involved planting computer code that destroyed as many as 1,000 nuclear centrifuges in Iran by making them spin out of control. It was widely considered a joint effort by Israel and the US.
In 1996, Hamas bomb maker Yahya Ayyash was killed in Gaza City when his mobile phone exploded during a weekly phone call to his father in the West Bank. Shin Bet, Israel’s security service, was believed to be behind the killing. In 2001, Israel was blamed for booby-trapping a public telephone in the center of the Palestinian city of Nablus, which exploded when Osama Jawabri, a member of a Palestinian militant group, went to use it.
In July, Ismail Haniyeh, political chief of the militant group Hamas, was killed by an explosion while staying in a guest house in Tehran. As usual, Israel neither confirmed nor denied it was behind the attack, which was believed to have occurred when a bomb planted in the guest house was triggered remotely.
--With assistance from Dana Khraiche, Youssef Diab, Onur Ant, Marissa Newman, Miranda Davis, Curtis Heinzl and Jane Lanhee Lee.
(Adds Taiwanese company’s denial its devices were the models that exploded in eighth paragraph.)
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