In what sounds like a plot of a fairly implausible science fiction story, hundreds of pagers belonging to members of Hezbollah exploded yesterday in what appears to be an very well coordinated, very sophisticated, attack against the organisation.
Unfortunately, whatever one might think of Hezbollah, some definitely innocent victims got caught up in the assault. At least two of the 12 people known to have died as a result were young children. Around 3,000 people were injured.
It’s still very early days, but the leading theory of how this could have been carried out looks to be that the pagers' hardware supply chain was interfered with several months ago.
The idea is that small explosive devices may have been inserted next to the pager batteries which were then, months later, remotely detonated via a radio signal.
After all, as a bomb disposal expert noted, a pager already has 3 of the 5 components necessary for an effective explosive device:
- container
- battery
- triggering mechanism
- detonator
- explosive charge
Another idea out there is that a hacker, or some previously-infiltrated malware, might have been able to cause the pager batteries to simultaneously overheat, resulting in the devices exploding.
But whilst overheating consumer devices igniting in dangerous circumstances are a real thing, it seems like experts think that the nature of the explosions likely pointed towards an actual explosive charge being involved.