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So there's the answer: the radios and batteries were discontinued in 2014, Hezbollah tried to keep using them, the batteries gradually died, so they began buying cheap third-party batteries made by someone unspecified … which gave the Israeli sigint people the perfect way to put bombs in them.
It's not just your electronics supply chain you need to secure; it's all the consumables.
https://mastodon.social/@thejapantimes/113163561903337024
@cstross But how could they be remote triggered, if not by having software complicit with the bombing inside the device? Or hacking the devices?
@MonniauxD @cstross the batteries themselves could have receivers or timers inside of them
@jonoleth @MonniauxD @cstross or they have a serial link to the pager - to communicate charge levels and the like, which is pretty common - and they managed to use that to hack the pager. How hardened do we think that interface would be?
@Colman @MonniauxD @cstross the pagers are a different issue. AFAIK they were entirely compromised, not just the battery.
According to Matt Blaze, the IC-V82 walkie-talkies don't have a data connection to the battery, so whatever they did would have had to be self-contained. I guess that makes it likelier it was on a timer, but who knows at this point
@jonoleth @Colman @MonniauxD @cstross a timer makes no sense at all. LoRaWan or so
@StOnSoftware @Colman @MonniauxD @cstross why wouldn't a timer make sense?
@jonoleth @StOnSoftware @Colman @MonniauxD Timers in batteries imply a very long-term plan because you can't tell when a battery is going to be swapped out. Whereas this appears to be in response to/in preparation for current events. (And the walkie-talkie handsets have a data interface to their batteries for charge monitoring etc. If the "battery" can reprogram the radio firmware, when inserted, and tell it to look for a specific signal and tell the battery when it comes, that'd work better.)
@cstross @jonoleth @StOnSoftware @MonniauxD on the other hand, Israel would have the capability to broadcast a strong triggering signal into that region. Pretty sure they have air superiority and electronic warfare assets above it.
@Colman @cstross @jonoleth @StOnSoftware @MonniauxD Better yet, the current draw is a side channel that could be detected by the battery. So arrange for it to blow when a particular audio signal is played on the speaker, which will be mirrored in the current draw.