Experts have shared theories about how hundreds of pagers — a type of communication device — may have exploded simultaneously in Lebanon on Tuesday (17), leaving thousands injured and others dead.
One theory is that there was a cybersecurity breach, causing the pagers’ lithium batteries to overheat and detonate.
Another is that this was a “supply chain attack,” causing devices to be tampered with during the manufacturing and shipping process.
David Kennedy, a former intelligence analyst at the US National Security Agency, told CNN that the explosions appear to be “too large for this to be a direct, remote hack that would overload the pager and cause a lithium battery explosion.”
Kennedy then assessed that he finds the second theory more plausible.
“It is more likely that Israel had human agents… in Hezbollah… The pagers would have been implanted with explosives and would probably only detonate when a certain message was received,” he said.
Hezbollah, Lebanon and other groups have blamed Israel for the incident. The Israeli military has said it will not comment on the incident.
“The complexity required to do this is staggering. It would have required many different intelligence and execution components. Human intelligence would be the primary method used to do this, along with intercepting the supply chain to make modifications to the pagers,” Kennedy added.
Paul Christensen, an expert in lithium-ion battery safety at Newcastle University, told Reuters news agency that the level of damage caused by the pager explosions appeared inconsistent with known cases of such battery failures in the past.
SMEX, a Lebanese digital rights organization, told Reuters that Israel could have exploited a weakness in the device to make it explode, bolstering the case that it had been tampered with.
Israeli intelligence forces have previously placed explosives in phones to target enemies, according to previous reports in the book Rise and Kill First.
Hackers have also demonstrated the ability to inject malicious code into personal devices, causing them to overheat and in some cases explode.
*with information from Reuters
This content was originally published in Why and how did Hezbollah’s pagers explode? See possible explanations on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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