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Iran’s Ambassador to Lebanon Loses One Eye, Seriously Damages Other in Pager Explosion, New York Times
Mojtaba Amani, according to the publication, is being evacuated to Iran for treatment. It is noted that before the explosion, the pagers emitted a beep, which prompted many to bring the devices to their faces.
The attack was probably carried out by Israeli intelligence services, which planted explosives in about 5,000 pagers, Reuters reports. Of these, about 3,000 exploded. A senior source in Lebanon told the agency that the devices were planted by the Israeli spy service “at the production level.” “The Mossad inserted a circuit board containing explosive material into the device, which receives a code. It is very difficult to detect by any means. Even with any device or scanner,” the source said.
The day before, 4,000 people were injured in Lebanon, 11 of whom were killed as a result of pager explosions. Reuters writes that hundreds of members of the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, including fighters and medics, were seriously injured due to explosions of pagers, which they use for secret communication.
A second wave of explosions today
Honestly, I’m not saying that I’m sure that that’s what it is – I listed both sabotaging equipment before distribution and this. Just that it’s possible to make them explode, and you have the quote from the Lebanese internal security people saying that they were “hacked”, which would indicate that it’d be the battery, because nothing else in a pager can do that. They might be wrong, of course – it just happened and they cannot have had a lot of time to examine them.
I don’t care all that much about sabotaged equipment – my electronics aren’t likely gonna have bombs built into them.
I’m a lot more concerned about the possibility of weaponizing the BMS on devices with lithium batteries. Like, there are a whole lot of those out there, and a whole lot of parties who might want to attack other parties via that route. It’s not an attack vector that I’ve thought much about, but it’s a big enough one that I’m not entirely sanguine about having devices with God knows what security on their BMS floating around.
Plus, the fire factor is honestly pretty bad on its own. Like, the explosion isn’t huge. Whatever the cause, in both the video I linked and the pager explosion video, we aren’t talking about a hand grenade or anything. Would really have to have the device on you for it to likely be a serious problem. But if you have some IoT device somewhere sitting around flammable material unattended, especially if lots of devices go off at the same time so that the fire department cannot respond to any one…shrugs That’s kind of a concerning thought.