The news today was that thousands of pagers in southern Lebanon exploded. Presumably Israel targeting Hezbollah.
Effects and Purpose
Not sure what to make of it. Sounds like mostly not lethal injuries, but it does disrupt things, it pains individuals, it marks locations, it litters their ranks with injuries that will mark them forever, disrupts communications to have thousands of pagers (pagers‽‽) all quit working and the units that don’t not be trusted, clogs up hospitals with lots of very serious if not fatal injuries.
Also, something very nasty about an attack that makes your enemies pockets explode. Israel loves that kind of thing.
It go me thinking, how would I do that? The technical side…
The Explosive
I am guessing that pagers manufactured today, at least some of them, have lithium ion batteries. These have a shrink wrap aspect to them, quite doable to substitute in a custom “battery” that looks normal, actually has a smaller than advertised battery, an electronic circuit driving a detonator, and something like C4 explosive filling most of the “battery” space.
Controlling It
A modern pager is going to have a microcontroller (dedicated tiny little computer) that runs most everything inside the pager, it watches for a special message that signals it is time to explode.
Triggering it
The next problem is how does it trigger the explosive in the fake-ish battery?
I’m guessing by controlling power consumption. Embedded microcontrollers go to great effort to consume as little power as possible, by doing things such as turning off all circuitry that they can whenever they can. The flip side of this is that the microcontroller could draw more power if it wants to. Sometimes it needs to (making noise, vibrating, transmitting in the case of a two-way pager), and the secret circuitry in the battery could monitor that.
I am guessing they pulse the power draw in a specific pattern and when the circuitry inside the battery detects the correct pattern it powers the detonator, and bang! Someone’s hand, his child, or a maybe hunk of his hip gets blown apart.
Bonus: a lithium battery is an inherently dangerous thing, maybe it can help fuel the pyrotechnics, make it more likely to start fires. Though, this might be tricky.
Supply Chain Attack
So to mess with the supply chain Shin Bet (that the right suspects?) needs to craft these fake-ish batteries and the altered software for the pagers.
Then in a shipment of pagers they need to open up each pager, attach a little probe to reprogram the firmware, unplug the original battery, plug in the explosive battery, reassemble it, put it back in the box in such a way as to make it look like it is still “factory fresh”.
More Hacking
Might also be nice to hack into the pager network, so that when it is party time they can send out a single broadcast message to tell all listening pagers to go bang. Instead of dialing the phone so many times, so to speak.
Follow Up
Because some will have been duds, this will be reverse engineered, and the news from that might get out. I wonder how close I am.
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