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smart phones as smart munitions?
war just got a bit more personal
today perhaps we saw an new evolution in warfare as chilling as it is unsurprising.
hezbollah and a variety of other groups have long used old school pagers as a communications modality because, unlike a cell or smart phone, they cannot be tracked. the system just broadcasts, it does not know where you are. it’s like having an FM radio.
this prevented network analysis and prevented them from being tracked and targeted. until now. (at least on the “targeted” piece.)
someone seems to have found the network and managed to cause all the pagers in it to overheat and explode at once to grim effect for those who had them in pockets. ...
some are arguing that israel somehow managed to get a hold of and compromise these pagers, perhaps at a distributor, perhaps by tradecraft of some sort. it’s possible, but i don’t believe it. i just do not believe the pagers turn over that fast or that it could be so easy or effective or accurately targeted without piles of collateral damage.
my wager (and obviously, i’m guessing here and have no special knowledge just a nasty mind and some technical savvy) is that this was more like stuxnet. it’s a software hack that used the code of the pagers to remotely compromise them, take over control at a basic level, and mismanage the battery/thermo processes to make it overheat and explode.
and this means that anything with a Li-ion battery and a network connection just became a highly targeted (and targetable) weapon. a laptop is a claymore. it makes most EV’s into WMD’s. a whole new arms race just started and such weapons tech never stays in the hands of governments for long.
it’s long been a fact of life that computers, cell phones, appliances, and vehicles are laughably insecure from the standpoint of a large nation state’s intelligence communities. if the NSA wants to root your cell phone, you’re getting rooted. ...
but now it has. and genies like this do not go back in the bottle. such ideas, once seen spread and metastasize. gloves come off and things explode. even if this was somehow a case of “we snuck a little semtex into the pagers” this vulnerability vector remains.
did we literally just see half our electronic world become a weapon? are we all carrying grenades with remote pins triggerable by who knows whom? because it sure looks like we are.
and that’s not good.
for a very long time, security around computers, systems, phones, appliances, cars, and 400 other electronic items has lagged hideously, much of it at government behest (and by “behest” i mean “demand” along the lines of “nice company you got there. make your phone OS secure or all your emails auto-encrypted by default and we’ll burn you to the waterline then sink what’s left.)
someone seems to have found the network and managed to cause all the pagers in it to overheat and explode at once to grim effect for those who had them in pockets. ...
some are arguing that israel somehow managed to get a hold of and compromise these pagers, perhaps at a distributor, perhaps by tradecraft of some sort. it’s possible, but i don’t believe it. i just do not believe the pagers turn over that fast or that it could be so easy or effective or accurately targeted without piles of collateral damage.
Turnabout is fair play.
Account holder harvesting has no sides, just provocations and body counts. As the bodies pile higher and deeper on both sides, the banksters smile.
Did the Iranian Ambassador to Lebanon have a Hezbollah provided Pager?
Nobody could assure that these devices were being detonated exclusively in the proximity of combatants. The superficial schadenfreude creates justification for more Hatfield and McCoy exchanges of atrocities, ultimately zero sum. Of course, maybe that's the purpose.
Nobody could assure that these devices were being detonated exclusively in the proximity of combatants. The superficial schadenfreude creates justification for more Hatfield and McCoy exchanges of atrocities, ultimately zero sum. Of course, maybe that's the purpose.
Some Millennials and a lot of GenZs are asking online, "what's a pager?"
That and this video of a Beirut ER is FAF.
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OK, seems like Israel did this, but how?
I remember several cases where Israelis inserted explosives into cellphones and even payphones so they could be blown up on demand remotely, and killed Palestinian terrorists that way.