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Comment by lbeltrame | Hacker News Reader

Question for those with more knowledge on these devices: how can they detonate? The batteries?

This article [1] has an image of the pager and a video supposedly showing one exploding in the bag of some guy while shopping groceries. From that I would suspect a supply chain attack integrating some explosive, that seems way too violent for just an exploding battery or anything else you would usually find in that kind of device.

[1] https://realrepublic.com/encrypted-hezbollah-pagers-simultan...

The batteries are the only major energy storage device there to breach.

Clearly Israel has found a software vulnerability that lets them overload some otherwise minimally used processor and overheat the batteries. Above ~140f lithium ion cells go into thermal runaway.

It seems like they actually installed small bombs in the devices.

How is it so clear to you?

I was discounting the possibility that Mossad was in control of global supplychains with sufficient intensity and recklessness to hide semtex and a detonator in an entire brand of consumer electronics, in its urgency to provide retroactive justification for every antisemitic conspiracy theory out there and ignite war with the entire Middle East.

The only thing in a pager that SHOULD BE THERE with enough energy to 'explode' on demand, is a lithium ion battery. Which is evidently, given further reports, not what happened here.

they had to have had some extra components added: batteries won't pop like that, they haven't that much energy.

It could be they had a way to warm up the batteries until these explode

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