the beeper, this ancestor of the mobile phone “hacked” to attack Hezbollah

TECHNOLOGY – Tam Tam, Tatoo, Kobby… If you are under 25, these words probably mean nothing to you. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, these brands of ” beepers » marketed by major French mobile operators were very successful. And it was this ancestor of the mobile phone that was targeted in a large-scale attack in Lebanon on Tuesday, September 17.

The Israeli army is indeed accused of having “hacked” dozens of these ” beepers » also called « pagers ” that were held by members of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas. The explosions killed at least 12 people and injured 2,800, including hundreds of members of the Iran-backed Islamist movement.

Motorola’s first pager, the Pageboy 1, created in 1964, allowed an audible alert to be sent to a box by telephone. Since the 1980s, the technology has been improved, allowing messages, audible alerts or telephone numbers to be received using a specific radio frequency and therefore without going through mobile telephone networks, which can experience interruptions, connection problems or interception of communications.

More than 2.3 million French people had a pager in 1998

According to the Spok company, 61 million pagers were in circulation worldwide in 1994. More than 2.3 million people owned them in France in 1998, before cell phones sounded their death knell. A 2022 Brut report using archive footage explained how they work, as you can see below.

These small electronic boxes that clip to a belt or slip into a pocket continue to be used today to communicate in certain sectors because of their reliability. “in the event of a wifi or telephone network failure”assures the beeper manufacturer Discover Systems on its website.

Thus according to a study by Journal of Hospital Medicine published in 2017, nearly 80% of hospital doctors surveyed used pagers and half of the messages received through them were related to patient care. Fans of Dr. House or other hospital series may have noticed the use of pagers by caregivers.

Hezbollah received “a thousand devices”

As evidenced by the explosions in Lebanon, Hezbollah members also appear to have adopted this outdated mode of communication, in part to circumvent poor or congested mobile coverage. Earlier this year, Hezbollah members interviewed by Reuters also revealed that they had recently switched to using pagers to avoid being tracked and traced by Israel on regular mobile phones.

According to a Source close to the movement to AFP, “ The beepers that exploded were from a shipment of a thousand devices recently imported by Hezbollah.which appear to have been “ hacked at the Source »The targeted pagers were Apollo, a Taiwan-based manufacturer, Reuters reports.

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