Noah Haggerty | (TNS) Los Angeles Occasions
Not less than 9 individuals have been killed and practically 3,000 individuals wounded throughout Lebanon on Tuesday afternoon when tons of of pagers utilized by Hezbollah and others nearly concurrently exploded.
Hezbollah has blamed Israel, the place officers and the navy have made no remark.
Many fashionable pagers use lithium-ion batteries — just like those present in smartphones — that are able to exploding.
Nonetheless, battery consultants say that it’s impossible the pagers may have been triggered to blow up with solely a wi-fi sign — and that the descriptions and video of the assault is inconsistent with battery explosions.
We talked with consultants to reply some fundamental questions on how the assault may have been carried out.
First, why is Hezbollah utilizing pagers?
Hezbollah switched from cellphones to pagers in latest months in an try and keep away from monitoring and surveillance.
Consultants mentioned it’s tough to discern the precise safety advantages the pagers present with out understanding the particular fashions. Many pagers solely hear for incoming indicators and don’t ship them. This makes monitoring tougher.
As well as, some pagers lack the GPS expertise that’s practically common in fashionable cellphones.
Fashionable within the Eighties and Nineteen Nineties, pagers are nonetheless utilized in some bodily high-stakes jobs that require dependable prolonged communication resulting from their longer battery lives.
In the US, customers embody personnel within the medical discipline — corresponding to docs and emergency medical technicians — and some nuclear energy plant operators.
May a cyberattack set off off-the-shelf pagers to blow up?
Lithium-ion batteries can explode in the event that they’re short-circuited. When this occurs, the battery releases gasoline and heats up — doubtlessly to effectively over a thousand levels. This course of is known as thermal runaway. When the gasoline reaches a sure strain within the battery, it explodes.
Some Hezbollah members reportedly felt their pagers warmth up earlier than they exploded.
However given the energy of the explosions and the way constant and coordinated they have been throughout 1000’s of units, electrical engineering and battery consultants mentioned the assault possible required modifying the pagers.
Battery consultants mentioned it’s unlikely {that a} wi-fi sign alone — with no bodily alterations — may trigger thermal runaway, which generally happens when a battery overheats, sustains bodily harm or overcharges.
It’s doable to remotely deactivate the software program that coordinates a protected charging. However as a result of the exploding pagers have been worn by Hezbollah members, and never being charged, this mode of failure is unlikely.
To set off an overheating failure, the pagers must attain at the least 140 levels, mentioned Scott Moura, an engineering professor at UC Berkeley who research battery security. However fashionable client electronics are designed to stop overheating, so there would possible be no easy software program that might obtain these temperatures.
To realize a battery explosion, Moura mentioned, “I think it would be much easier to physically modify it.”
When batteries do explode, does it look something like what occurred in Lebanon?
Many of the accidents in Lebanon have been to the face, palms or abdomen — close to the place the pager can be carried.
“I’ve been involved in law cases where batteries have been in pockets and burned their legs or where vaping products have done severe damage to the face,” mentioned Michael Pecht, an engineering professor on the College of Maryland who research battery reliability.
However he and different consultants mentioned the fatalities recommend that these explosions have been totally different.
“When these things fail, they can burn people and do some damage,” mentioned Ofodike Ezekoye, a College of Texas at Austin professor who research how lithium-ion batteries can fail. “But it’s very rare for one of these to be able to kill someone.”
How may the pagers been bodily modified to blow up?
Inflicting a brief circuit in a battery to set off thermal runaway and an explosion with a bodily alteration is pretty straight-forward, Pecht mentioned. The batteries may even be modified to blow up at a dependable time after the brief circuit is triggered.
Nonetheless, he and different consultants mentioned, creating an explosion according to the footage would in all probability require extra excessive modifications.
Perpetrators may’ve added an explosive chemical to the battery cells that might be onerous to detect, Ezekoye mentioned. Then, with a small electrical sign, set off them to blow up.
He mentioned confirming the true mechanism would require learning the pagers in query. “I would imagine the Lebanon authorities are trying to find any possible pagers that did not fail,” he mentioned.
Have related assaults been carried out earlier than?
Exploding client electronics just isn’t a brand new tactic.
In 2010, Al Qaeda planted explosives inside two printer cartridges on UPS and FedEx cargo flights. In 2016, a bomb inside a laptop computer exploded throughout a Somali passenger flight, injuring two individuals.
Israel is suspected of utilizing an exploding telephone in 1996 to goal a Palestinian bomb-maker. In that case, the telephone was bodily modified and the operation didn’t contain malicious software program.
Nonetheless, exploding electronics have by no means been used on the dimensions seen Tuesday in Lebanon.
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Initially Revealed: September 18, 2024 at 11:26 a.m.
