Hezbollah's Pagers Explode In Pocket In Lebanon And Syria

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Details of exactly how this feat was accomplished
are still under wraps.
News reports say that the pagers exploded by overheating their lithium batteries.
This means that while the pagers sent and received encrypted messages, their operating systems were not secure.

One of our readers reports his suspicion that the pagers were modified somewhere in transit and contained explosives. In reviewing the latest videos it does look as if the devices exploded.

This suggests that the operation against Hezbollah was conducted over a period of time, with superb intelligence and access to pagers' origins or waypoints.

In 1996, Hamas bomb maker Yahya Ayyash was killed in Gaza City when his cell phone exploded during his weekly phone call to his father in the West Bank. It was a targeted assassination by the Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service. If this is a repeat performance on a massive scale, it would be unprecedented.

Encrypted pagers can be text only or text and voice.
Many of them, even US brands, are made in Asia.
China offers a number of models.

It is likely that the pagers used by Hezbollah were dual voice-text devices, meaning they were bigger than small text pagers and resemble a walkie-talkie. Such devices would have a larger lithium battery to support voice communications and allow longer-range operations.

One assumes, therefore, that it was possible to infect the pagers with malware that could override temperature controls inside the pagers and“cook” the batteries.

Lithium-ion batteries are prone to explosion. Devices have gone off unexpectedly even on airlines. Temperature is one way to detonate a battery, although there are other methods.

But more is involved.
It is obvious that while the pagers were encrypted, their signals could still be tracked, meaning that it was possible to identify the Hezbollah operatives and those cooperating with them, especially Iranians, who were part of the network.

It is likely only pagers belonging to Hezbollah-linked terrorists and their leaders were targeted. There are no reports, as yet, of civilians such as first responders experiencing exploding pagers.

The last time this level of cyberattack was mounted, that we know of, was the US and Israeli attack on Iran's uranium enrichment centrifuges in 2010.