On Tuesday, September 17, hundreds of pagers belonging to agents of Hezbollah, a Lebanese Shiite Islamist political party and paramilitary group, exploded simultaneously in Lebanon and Syria, causing panic and instantly giving rise to numerous theories. According to the first and most frequently heard version, Israel hacked all of these devices in order to trigger these explosions later.
But for former intelligence analysts, quoted by the American magazine Forbes, this type of remote hacking is not the most likely explanation for the events that occurred on Tuesday. “Looking at the videos, it appears that the explosion was far more powerful than anything that could be produced by a regular computer chip.”a former Israeli military agent who wished to remain anonymous told Forbes.
Subscribe to the korii newsletter for free!Don’t miss any korii articles with this daily selection, delivered straight to your inbox.
Trapped from the start
For this expert, it is more likely that the devices were intercepted before being delivered, with the aim of being equipped with explosives, as well as software to detonate them using a trigger message. Patrick Wardle, a cybersecurity researcher and former NSA analyst, now head of the security company DoubleYou, confirms that the theory is plausible and that it would not have been particularly difficult to proceed in this way.
“It is easy to modify the device secretly”he tells Forbes. Patrick Wardle adds that“Unless someone turns on the beepers, nothing seems fishy. It’s basically putting a bomb in a device and connecting it to a software trigger.” To show how literally child’s play this operation can be, he cites an experiment conducted in 2014 during which a duo of hackers managed to carry out a similar operation. “If two kids could do that, imagine what a real intelligence agency can do.”
This is not the first time that Israel has been accused of sabotaging digital devices for the purpose of destruction. The 2011 Stuxnet attacks, in which Iranian uranium enrichment facilities were destroyed by malware, for example, were blamed on Israel and US intelligence agencies.
For the online media Fast Company, Alan Woodward, professor of cybersecurity at the University of Surrey (south of England), specifies that in his opinion, Hezbollah has reason to bite its fingers. “Hezbollah made a mistake when it told its most senior elements to stop using mobile phones for fear of being tracked.he believes. They decided to switch to pagers, but these are only offered by a limited number of retailers.” Finding the supplier’s address in order to hack the devices before their distribution would therefore not have been such a complicated thing.
This Wednesday, September 18, in the middle of the afternoon, new simultaneous and similar explosions took place in several cities in Lebanon, including the suburbs of Beirut where the funerals of Hezbollah members killed the day before were taking place. This time, https://twitter.com/afpfr/status/1836415967078834344 belonging to the Lebanese Islamist organization that are concerned. After the twelve dead and some 2,800 injured on Tuesday, an initial report indicated three new deaths and at least a hundred people injured.
