Noah Haggerty | (TNS) Los Angeles Times
At least nine people were killed and nearly 3,000 people wounded across Lebanon on Tuesday afternoon when hundreds of pagers used by Hezbollah and others almost simultaneously exploded.
Hezbollah has blamed Israel, where officials and the military have made no comment.
Many modern pagers use lithium-ion batteries — similar to the ones found in smartphones — which are capable of exploding.
However, battery experts say that it’s very unlikely the pagers could have been triggered to explode with only a wireless signal — and that the descriptions and video of the attack is inconsistent with battery explosions.
We talked with experts to answer some basic questions about how the attack could have been carried out.
First, why is Hezbollah using pagers?
Hezbollah switched from cellphones to pagers in recent months in an attempt to avoid tracking and surveillance.
Phones constantly send signals to nearby cell towers to register their location, enabling calls to be properly routed. Eavesdroppers can intercept these pings to determine their location.
Experts said it’s difficult to discern the exact security benefits the pagers provide without knowing the specific models. Many pagers only listen for incoming signals and do not send them. This makes tracking harder.
In addition, some pagers lack the GPS technology that is nearly universal in modern cellphones.
Popular in the 1980s and 1990s, pagers are still used in some physical high-stakes jobs that require reliable extended communication due to their longer battery lives.
In the United States, users include personnel in the medical field — such as doctors and emergency medical technicians — and some nuclear power plant operators.
Could a cyberattack trigger off-the-shelf pagers to explode?
Lithium-ion batteries can explode if they’re short-circuited. When this happens, the battery releases gas and heats up — potentially to well over a thousand degrees. This process is called thermal runaway. When the gas reaches a certain pressure in the battery, it explodes.
Some Hezbollah members reportedly felt their pagers heat up before they exploded.
But given the strength of the explosions and how consistent and coordinated they were across thousands of devices, electrical engineering and battery experts said the attack likely required modifying the pagers.
Battery experts said it’s unlikely that a wireless signal alone — with no physical alterations — could cause thermal runaway, which typically occurs when a battery overheats, sustains physical damage or overcharges.
It’s possible to remotely deactivate the software that coordinates a safe charging. But because the exploding pagers were worn by Hezbollah members, and not being charged, this mode of failure is unlikely.
To trigger an overheating failure, the pagers would have to reach at least 140 degrees, said Scott Moura, an engineering professor at UC Berkeley who studies battery safety. But modern consumer electronics are designed to prevent overheating, so there would likely be no simple software that could achieve these temperatures.
To achieve a battery explosion, Moura said, “I think it would be much easier to physically modify it.”
When batteries do explode, does it look anything like what happened in Lebanon?
Most of the injuries in Lebanon …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
