At least nine people were killed and nearly 3,000 injured across Lebanon on Tuesday afternoon when lots of of pagers utilized by Hezbollah and others exploded almost concurrently.
Hezbollah blamed Israel for the incident; there was no official or military comment.
Many modern pagers use lithium-ion batteries – just like those present in smartphones – which may explode.
Battery experts, nonetheless, say it is extremely unlikely that the pagers might have been detonated by a radio signal alone. In addition, the descriptions and video of the attack usually are not consistent with battery explosions.
We spoke to experts to reply some basic questions on how the attack might need been carried out.
First, why does Hezbollah use pagers?
Hezbollah switched from mobile phones to pagers in recent months to avoid persecution and surveillance.
Telephones consistently send signals to nearby cell towers to register their location so calls may be routed properly. Eavesdroppers can intercept these pings to find out their location.
Experts say it's difficult to know the precise security advantages of pagers without knowing the particular models. Many pagers only listen for incoming signals and don't send them, making tracking difficult.
In addition, some pagers lack GPS technology, which is nearly universal in modern cell phones.
Pagers were popular within the Eighties and Nineties and, due to their longer battery life, are still used today in some physically demanding jobs that require reliable, prolonged communication.
In the United States, these are the users Medical personnel — comparable to doctors and paramedics — and some nuclear power plant operators.
Could a cyberattack cause industrial pagers to blow up?
Lithium-ion batteries can explode in the event that they are short-circuited. When this happens, the battery releases gas and heats up – possibly to well over a thousand degrees. This process known as thermal runaway. When the gas within the battery reaches a certain pressure, it explodes.
Some Hezbollah members According to reports felt their pagers heat up before they exploded.
But given the ability of the explosions and the way regular and coordinated they were, hitting 1000’s of devices, electrical and battery experts said the attack likely required a modification to the pagers.
Battery experts said it was unlikely that a wireless signal alone – without physical changes – could cause thermal runaway, which generally occurs when a battery overheats, becomes physically damaged or is overcharged.
It is feasible to remotely disable the software that coordinates the protected charging, but for the reason that exploding pagers were carried by Hezbollah members and weren’t charged, this sort of failure is unlikely.
To trigger an overheating error, the pagers would have to succeed in at the very least 140 degrees, says Scott Moura, an engineering professor at UC Berkeley who studies battery safety. But modern consumer electronics are designed to forestall overheating, so there's probably no easy software that would reach those temperatures.
To cause a battery explosion, Moura said, “I think it would be much easier to physically modify it.”
If batteries explode, is it just like what happened in Lebanon?
Most injuries in Lebanon occurred on the face, hands and abdomen – near where the pager was worn.
“I've been involved in legal cases where batteries were in pockets and caused burns on legs or e-cigarettes caused serious injuries to the face,” says Michael Pecht, an engineering professor on the University of Maryland who studies battery reliability.
However, he and other experts said the death toll suggests those explosions were other events.
“When these things fail, they can burn people and cause damage,” says Ofodike Ezekoye, a professor on the University of Texas at Austin who studies how lithium-ion batteries can fail. “But it's very rare that one of them kills someone.”
How could the pagers be physically modified to blow up?
Creating a brief circuit in a battery that triggers a physical change that causes thermal runaway and an explosion is fairly easy, Pecht said. The batteries may even be modified to blow up at a reliable time after the short circuit is triggered.
However, he and other experts said more drastic changes would likely be needed to create an explosion consistent with the footage.
The perpetrators could have added an explosive that was difficult to detect to the battery cells, said Ezekoye. They could then have triggered the explosion with a weak electrical signal.
To confirm the true mechanism, the pagers in query would should be examined, he said. “I could imagine that the Lebanese authorities are trying to find all possible pagers that did not fail,” he said.
Have there been similar attacks before?
The explosion of consumer electronics will not be a brand new tactic.
In 2010 Explosives planted in two printer cartridges on UPS and FedEx cargo flights. In 2016 Bomb exploded in a laptop during a Somali passenger flight, injuring two people.
Israel is suspected of an exploding phone in 1996 to Target of a Palestinian bomb makerIn this case, the phone was physically modified and no malware was utilized in the operation.
However, never before have explosives been used on the size seen in Lebanon on Tuesday.
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