Someone blew up 5000 pagers.

[Moab]

And NT2C is right the amount of tech to do this would take a while. Chances are they intercepted them between the manufacturer and users. Changed the tech and planted the explosives.

As I said, the pager brand name was licensed to a company in Hungary that was likely an Israeli front.  That company contracted with the bad guys to supply the pagers.  More than likely the front company already had a large quantity of the pagers previously made and packaged, just waiting to be shipped.

With the radios, they were supposedly intercepted in Jordan.  Looking at photos of what was left of the radios I see Icom business radios with very little damage but the battery blown off.  That makes me think the batteries were swapped during the intercept with a supply of batteries already on hand with explosives embedded.  That would have been a fast way to rig them during a 24-hour or less intercept.

The ICOM radios probably came from AliBaba or something, because the company stopped making them over a decade ago. They (ICOM) say that the radios on the market now are all mostly counterfeit. The Lebanon comms agency said " The IC-V82 radios were not supplied by a recognized agent, were not officially licensed and had not been vetted by the security services". Very dumb.

As for the pagers, this is getting more interesting. BAC Consulting, the owner of the license from Gold Apollo, was incorporated in 2022, and only has one shareholder listed in the paperwork: a Cristiana Bársony-Arcidiacono. Her LinkedIn profile lists affiliations with organizations that haven't heard of her or only met in passing. NBC got ahold of her and she's claiming to be nothing more than a broker. There's no records of the company moving any kind of inventory or receiving deliveries. Hungary is denying BAC Consulting has ANY manufacturing capability. Definitely feels like a front company to me. 

I saw pics of the icoms. The entire radios were blown up not just the battery.

I keep thinking about where you carry pagers and radios. All normal locations on the body would take very little explosive to cause catastrophic damage. And plenty of shrapnel in the radio itself. If they didn't add some. Which I suspect they might of if they could have kept the weight down.

It really is a fascinating operation. Just from an espionage standpoint. And technically. Anything can be swapped out during shipment. And any product can be perfectly faked these days. I saw one video trying to show how they grabbed the equipment in shipment and modified them. I call bs. They for sure intercepted a few to make exact copies, modified those copies, and probably had packaged replacements already modified that they could simply swap out - faked shipping box and all. For a seamless, quick swap during shipment.

But to know who they were going too. Is a coup. And the decision to set 5000 of them off at once. Not to mention whatever monitoring they had put in place technically.

Trojan horses like this must exist all over the Arab world. Toasters, washing machines, hair dryers, bombs in walls, normal devices with cellular and location based capabilites. Anything could be set up like this. There must be hundreds of operations around the world like this. Just passive devices, sitting, waiting for the day an operative sends a code. And boom. Or the massive amount of monitoring they must be doing with these or similar devices.

I always thought it was weird that every cable company wants you to name, label and refer to each of their devices by the room in your house it resides in. Back in the day I often wondered if a normal person would even notice a microphone on a circuit board? Or a pin camera. And with the known room location of the device you could locate that source within a given home. Of course tech is far beyond that now. Every room has a tv. And every tv goes to great lengths to listen to your voice for commands. 1984. We're living it. Lol

[majorhavoc]

"Allah smiles upon us, Hassan my Hezbollah brother! Look what I have found on this sketchy, totally unregulated Chinese retail website! A company claiming to be ICOM is selling a model of radio they stopped manufacturing 10 years ago! And in lots of 1000 for a pauper's sum!  Hmmm, the delivery time seems suspiciously long, even by Chinese standards .... no matter! Long is our memory and infinite is our patience for vengeance against the heathen dogs who are our enemies!  

Allah ahkbar as I click "buy now"!"

[NT2C]

And NT2C is right the amount of tech to do this would take a while. Chances are they intercepted them between the manufacturer and users. Changed the tech and planted the explosives.

As I said, the pager brand name was licensed to a company in Hungary that was likely an Israeli front.  That company contracted with the bad guys to supply the pagers.  More than likely the front company already had a large quantity of the pagers previously made and packaged, just waiting to be shipped.

With the radios, they were supposedly intercepted in Jordan.  Looking at photos of what was left of the radios I see Icom business radios with very little damage but the battery blown off.  That makes me think the batteries were swapped during the intercept with a supply of batteries already on hand with explosives embedded.  That would have been a fast way to rig them during a 24-hour or less intercept.

The ICOM radios probably came from AliBaba or something, because the company stopped making them over a decade ago. They (ICOM) say that the radios on the market now are all mostly counterfeit. The Lebanon comms agency said " The IC-V82 radios were not supplied by a recognized agent, were not officially licensed and had not been vetted by the security services". Very dumb.

As for the pagers, this is getting more interesting. BAC Consulting, the owner of the license from Gold Apollo, was incorporated in 2022, and only has one shareholder listed in the paperwork: a Cristiana Bársony-Arcidiacono. Her LinkedIn profile lists affiliations with organizations that haven't heard of her or only met in passing. NBC got ahold of her and she's claiming to be nothing more than a broker. There's no records of the company moving any kind of inventory or receiving deliveries. Hungary is denying BAC Consulting has ANY manufacturing capability. Definitely feels like a front company to me. 

I saw pics of the icoms. The entire radios were blown up not just the battery.

Radio is fine, battery is destroyed.



Radio is mostly undamaged, battery missing

[Moab]

https://youtu.be/HkFshPKzGiM?si=jhf50ddnTjx3R3NU

[NT2C]

There's a bunch of other stuff there besides the radio

[Moab]

Here's an in-depth look at the situation. Apparently these pagers were either purchased or supplied to Hezbollah by Iran. The Iranian diplomat to Lebonan was carrying one. And suffered great injury to his face. You have to ask yourself why he was carrying one?

He also states how much explosive was in each one. Apparently Israel has such a deep operation going on  they were able to find out that 2 members of Hezbollah figured out the pagers were no good. So Israel decided to detonate them. Before anyone else was tipped off. The detonation method was they were able to send out like three messages that appeared to come from Hezbollah high command. So everyone got their pagers out. Those that lost eyes were most likely looking at their pagers. The explosive was placed behind one of the batteries. They overheated the battery. And that detonated the explosives. 

He shows a couple videos of the pagers exploding in like a supermarket and a store. But apparently there are many more very graphic videos of detonations. 


https://youtu.be/oJSi67emPvs?si=jtshtogDPBBED3r2

This all reminded me of a Mossad guy I used to work with. He did bug sweeps for a company I worked for. Super smart, very religious dude. Who had become disinfranchised with Mossad. Left. And immigrated to the US. As apparently the sexual and other morals within the organized he highly disagreed with. I have no proof he was who he said he was. But he knew his job very well. Had a very heavy accent. And very much appeared to be who he said he was. I had alot of conversations with him. And I was very impressed with what I perceived as the mind of a highly specialized foreign intelligence person. The Mossad are on another level. 

[Raptor]

"Allah smiles upon us, Hassan my Hezbollah brother! Look what I have found on this sketchy, totally unregulated Chinese retail website! A company claiming to be ICOM is selling a model of radio they stopped manufacturing 10 years ago! And in lots of 1000 for a pauper's sum!  Hmmm, the delivery time seems suspiciously long, even by Chinese standards .... no matter! Long is our memory and infinite is our patience for vengeance against the heathen dogs who are our enemies! 

Allah ahkbar as I click "buy now"!"

Brilliant!

I really would not want to be the purchasing department employee who signed the purchase order.

[DarkAxel]

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/27/middleeast/israel-pager-attack-hezbollah-lebanon-invs-intl/index.html

Hezbollah had some of those pagers that didn't go off during the attack because they were turned off. Turns out Israel figured out how to hide explosives inside the Li-ion batteries. Yup, they turned a lithium battery into an explosive device. If I got this figured out right it's absolutely brilliant.

Lithium batteries need overcharge protection and voltage control to keep from shorting out, and it can be hacked. Add some kind of boom juice to the lithium and you've got a functional battery/bomb that can be set off at command, and is undetectable if x-rayed. I bet Hezbollah is looking at anything with a lithium battery as a potential threat now. If it can't be detected by a bomb sniffer, well, that capability is frankly quite frightening.

Also, there's a bit more info on who made the pagers. Looks like someone who used to work at Gold Apollo had the rights to the pager and opened a company named Apollo Systems HK. They have a Youtube channel:

[MacWa77ace]

watching that video is like watching a N64 unboxing video. Yep some people still use that tech too. Mine still works and is hooked up.

Hope its really difficult to make a Li bomb. Cause this opens a new chapter in airline security.

[NT2C]

I said from the start that the charges were in the batteries: https://www.reuters.com/graphics/ISRAEL-PALESTINIANS/HEZBOLLAH-PAGERS/mopawkkwjpa/

[MacWa77ace]

Battery pack internals

Two lithium-ion cells sandwich a sheet of plastic explosive and a strip of highly inflammable material

[NT2C]

PETN is nasty stuff. I got to play with some during my Gunner's Mate training. It almost doesn't need a detonator. The stuff just wants to explode.