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Notes -
Crazy news out of the Middle East today.
While Iran plots its big revenge via Hezbollah, Israel isn't just waiting around for them to strike. They're pre-emptively disrupting their operations. And today's attack is next-level.
Somehow, Israel hacked the pagers used by a couple thousand Hezbollah members. And then they made the pagers explode simultaneously, leaving over 200 of them seriously injured.
People on Twitter are speculating that Israel confiscated the pagers, then implanted explosives, and then returned them to Hezbollah who stupidly continued to use them . It seems unlikely that a software hack could make a battery explode. Edit: A better explanation is that Israel somehow intercepted the pagers during shipping and implanted explosives.Whatever happened, its more evidence of both Israel's ability to strike at its enemies, and also the incompetence of those enemies.
From a strategic standpoint, it seems that Israel is now grimly determined to win the war militarily as they (accurately) perceive their enemies as unreliable partners in peace.
Technical part is not interesting. Many ways to do it. I am not sure how exposing this capability now helps Israel.
This is one of those - it can work only once things. So they either had some imminent threat to deal with or...?
It doesn't just work once but it imposes an ongoing cost to your enemies operations to avoid the same thing happening again.
I mean... wouldn't they just make sure to dismantle a handful of pagers before distributing them from now on? They'd have to pack the things with high explosives to get a result like this, would be easy to find, not much of a cost.
They'll likely short term want to change up suppliers if that info is compromised, but by blowing up all the pagers Israel has revealed this which means it can't be used in the future and if there are other capabilities downstream from this supplier compromised like wire taps etc. Now Hezbollah knows to toss the electronics.
Supposedly the batteries were swapped with equivalent batteries with added explosives. Merely looking at its insides may not be informative. Are they also going to cut apart batteries and other components? On a sampling of units or every one?
As a trust issue: the next time a member of hezbollah is given a device for communication, will they trust it or fear it is a bomb or tracking device or otherwise compromised?
Yeah that'd still be pretty easy. You wouldn't need to sample every one. Just one per 50, a few per shipment, that sort of thing. I imagine they fear pretty much all electronics could be used for tracking since Israel or the US might drone strike them at any time and anywhere anyways.
You any I have a different understanding of easy.
Cutting apart every component large enough to plausibly hold a bomb and correctly inspecting it by people who know what they are doing on a sampling of every incoming shipment is an enormous burden. I have spent months of my life going to other countries and telling people who assemble and test electronics "do this thing like I'm showing you now". And then later they don't do what I showed them.
I think these people would have the obvious idea to check their equipment for bombs, and then almost entirely fail to actually check their equipment for bombs.
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