Current reporting from NYT and others (gift link:
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/09/17/world/israel-hamas-war-news?unlocked_article_code=1.LU4.yQNN.lrxL0ef79K2O&smid=url-share) essentially confirms the speculation: Supply chain tampering with a new batch of 3000 pagers from Taiwan ordered by Hezbollah, involving adding 2oz of explosive material near the battery. Reports of 2800 injured, implying that essentially all of them went off, apparently nearly simultaneously, suggesting this was not targeting particular individuals (just anyone with a pager in the batch). At least nine deaths so far.
Pagers Explode Across Lebanon in Apparent Attack on Hezbollah
The attack killed 11 people, including a young girl. Officials briefed on the operation say Israeli operatives planted explosives in pagers Hezbollah bought from a Taiwanese company. Israel declined to comment.
... The pagers apparently were programmed to beep and then display a message ostensibly from Hezbollah leadership, and then explode, behavior that would encourage users to be in close proximity to the device as it exploded.
...
Unclear from reporting how they were triggered. Some possibilities include:
- completely offline (all the compromised pagers were pre-programmed to beep and explode at a particular time)
- a broadcast signal (possibly sent by a high power transmitter controlled by Israel) that all the devices were programed to respond to
- individually addressed messages to each of the pagers (less likely, since that would take a while to go through).
My guess is the first.
... The disadvantage (to the attacker) of offline pre-scheduled triggering is that it becomes essentially impossible to scrub or reschedule the attack if something goes wrong or there's reason for delay. So I wouldn't rule out a broadcast signal entirely. Assuming some of the devices survived (duds, etc), I'd imagine there's a lot of reverse-engineering being attempted right now.
Notably, the NYT reporting isn't hedging even slightly on identifying Israel as the source of the attack, though does note that they haven't officially commented.
As I've noted elsewhere, one-way pagers (at least the kind that don't explode) are actually a pretty good way for a covert organization to communicate with its members. Unlike cellphones, which are constantly registering with a local tower, pagers don't expose the locations of recipients to the infrastructure or to eavesdroppers. They work by "flooding" - broadcasting all messages over the entire service area, leaving it to the devices to filter out the messages addressed to them.
Another note: a supply chain compromise is a very powerful capability, and by using it this way they effectively completely burned it, foreclosing the possibility of future exploitation. Hezbollah (and anyone else who considers Israel an adversary) is going to be *very* careful about how it sources its gear for the foreseeable future. (What else might you do if you could control comms gear of your adversary?) This was likely VERY carefully considered, likely at the highest levels of government.
The plot continues to thicken, with another wave of exploding devices reported among Hezbollah members around Lebanon today. This time, it appears to include walkie-talkie-type radios. I've not yet found reliable reports of specific models of radios, so it's hard to even speculate yet on how these might have been triggered - possibly over the air, but also possibly with a pre-set timer.
What's clear is that Hezbollah's supply chain problem is even worse than it seemed yesterday.
Note that there are obviously a large number of moral, ethical, and legal questions about this whole operation. I'm focused on the technical, strategic, and logistical issues in this thread, which should not be taken to suggest in any way that I don't think those questions are important or worth probing. It's just not what I'm exploring here.
On the latest round of explosions, so far I've found a couple photos of a mangled Icom model V82 walkie-talkie, a discontinued (but still widely available around the world in counterfeited form) commercial analog two-way radio.
But it's unclear if that's the only type of device that exploded today, and it's also possible that the various photos I've seen are all of the same individual radio. Still haven't seen good authoritative reports of the scope and scale of todays wave of explosions.
At this point, everyone in Lebanon and Hezbollah has to be wondering what's going to be exploding tomorrow.
So I've now seen video and stills of several different exploded radios. All appear to be Icom V82s (or something that looks similar). In all but one case, the battery was missing, and the damage to the radio itself was relatively small, adding credence to the hypothesis that the explosion came from the battery pack. I believe the battery form factor is common to a number of Icom models, including the current ones. So possibly what was compromised was a shipment of replacement batteries.
Walkie-talkie radios differ from pagers in several relevant ways here. First, they're larger, and so have room to hide more explosive material; some of the images I've seen show damaged buildings, suggesting larger explosions than we saw with the pagers.
Second, walkie-talkies aren't generally carried around all the time the way pagers are. They typically spend a lot of time off and sitting in a charger, possibly near other radios. This is also consistent with the images of damaged buildings.
Icom may not be a household name (well, it is in my household, but I'm a nerd). They're a major manufacturer of two-way and related radio gear for commercial, industrial, public safety, marine, aviation, and amateur markets, based in Japan and marketed around the world. The V82 radio that was apparently exploding is an older, discontinued model, but counterfeit versions of it from various Chinese sources are widely available.
In any case, the V82 battery does not have a data connection to the host radio, so that means that (assuming it was the battery pack that exploded) any triggering mechanism was likely self-contained in the battery pack and did not make use of the communications capability of the radio itself. That would mean it was trigged by either an offline timer or a separate receiver/antenna inside the battery pack. If the latter, it would have to be in range of a signal sent by the attacker.
Current reporting says at least 20 deaths and 450 injuries from today’s walkie-talkie explosions (this is on top of yesterday’s pagers). The pagers seem to have injured (roughly) a single individual each. The apparently more powerful explosions from the walkie-talkies may have each claimed more victims. So it’s less clear from this how many compromised devices were actually involved today.
Notably, yesterday the fact that Hezbollah had recently ordered and received a large number of pagers was immediately reported. There doesn’t seem to be any similar information coming out yet about new radios (or radio battery packs). This might be simply because sources are drying up or haven’t yet spoken, or it might be that today’s attack didn’t exploit Hezbollah’s supply chain in the same way the pager attack did.
Important caveats on all this: there’s a lot we don’t know, and much of what we assume we know may be mistakenly or deliberately misleading. In particular, as far as I know, no one has yet reverse engineered or forensically examined (or publicly reported the result of any such investigation) any surviving pagers or radios, which would be very helpful in confirming a lot of these assumptions.
Some new details reported in this NYT article (gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/world/middleeast/israel-exploding-pagers-hezbollah.html?unlocked_article_code=1.L04.bSZU.vUhf54b0cGP_&smid=url-share)
This fills in some gaps, assuming it's accurate (caveat here, given anonymous, presumably motivated sources):
- The pagers were manufactured by a Hungary-based Israeli shell company and used a special battery containing PETN.
- The explosions were trigged in real time, but no details about the specific triggering mechanism.
- No details about how the exploding walkie-talkies worked or how they were inserted.
How Israel Built a Modern-Day Trojan Horse: Exploding Pagers
The Israeli government did not tamper with the Hezbollah devices that exploded, defense and intelligence officials say. It manufactured them as part of an elaborate ruse.
... So we know a lot more about the pagers at this point than the exploding walkie-talkies, which appear to have made their way into Hezbollah's hands through a different channel than the pagers. Unclear whether the radios even involved a supply chain compromise, as opposed to, e.g, an insider mole swapping out radios and/or batteries.
Hezbollah's scale works against them here. The problem with the pagers was they needed to buy so many of them (3000!) that it was effectively impossible to source them quietly and anonymously within the local economy. Instead, they had to act like a bureaucracy, putting out solicitations and ordering in bulk from suppliers. This exposed them. The seller (Israel) was able to react, attract their business, and deliver rigged devices as part of what appeared to be a normal business transaction.
But again, none of this was necessarily how the exploding walkie-talkies were delivered. We don't know much of anything about that yet.
Also notable: While Israel isn't saying anything publicly, it apparently did brief the US government on at least the pager operation, and US intelligence officials are "leaking" those details with the press. I don't think for a moment that those "leaks" are unauthorized or causing Israel any particular heartache. It's likely in their interests to have everyone know they were behind this, but also to stop short of admitting it.
Lebanese military now doing controlled demolitions of suspect pagers and walkie-talkies, implying that at least some of the sabotaged devices failed to detonate. I would strongly suspect that they aren’t blowing up all of them, but saving a few for (presumably extremely careful) reverse engineering and forensic analysis.
After another day, the contrast between the large amount of information known/leaked about the pagers and the paucity of detail about the radios is even more conspicuous to me.
Most of the detail about the pager attack (shell companies, explosives built into batteries, etc) appears to have come directly from Israel, which benefits from advertising that it had this capability now that it's burned. But the radios likely exploited a different channel, probably one they still want to protect.
And we know almost NOTHING about how the radios were compromised, not even insider speculation. We don't even know that it was a supply chain attack in the sense that the pagers were.
My guess, with no inside information, is that the radios may have been compromised with the help of a recruited agent working for Hezbollah and still inside Lebanon. That's obviously not something you'd want to draw attention to if you're Israel.
An important tl;dr takeaway from this whole story: These explosions were not caused by a software bug or cyberattack that could be arbitrarily repeated against ordinary pagers, radios, or phones. This was an extremely sophisticated, at least somewhat risky, and definitely expensive intelligence and sabotage operation that involved covertly getting special devices rigged with explosives into the hands of Hezbollah affiliates.
In other words, no one can just type a command to blow up your phone.
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