So Israel managed to distribute a ~1000 pagers with builtin explosives to Hezbollah? Sounds possibly very targeted but very difficult.
And they all use the same model, from the same single source and never open it to repair? OTOH people higher up in the hierarchy may use newer models, as a sign of their position. And if Israel had access to the metadata at least, they may be able to infer who is who.
Very interesting story.

@chris If it was just the battery exploding, is that even possible with current batteries (and why/how) , a battery getting hot and burning is nothing new but really exploding like the images show ?

LiIon batteries can burn and “explode” quite violently so if there’s a way to remotely hack the devices’ firmware and if the batteries in the devices are cheap and don’t have any additional protection circuitry that makes them stay within safe parameters, I can imagine that there is a way to trigger an unsafe condition.
Many people tend to carry their pager in their trousers, close to the body, so a battery burning violently could do a lot of damage.

Still that would be impressive. But we’ve had #stuxnet, so there are people working on even more elaborate attacks.

I will not look for more videos of these events but the one I’ve just seen shows none of the smoke and dirt that usually is part of a LiIon battery going off.
To me this looks like a modern explosive.

If this really is a picture of one of the pagers that exploded, it seems to be the model “Gold Apollo Rugged Pager AR924”:
The case does not seem burned or molten, that may be an indicator for an explosive and not a battery going off.
#pager #apollo #gold
Link to product: https://web.archive.org/web/20240917150158/https://www.apollosystemshk.com/product/42.html
(The original page has been pulled minutes ago.)