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Comment by isoprophlex | Hacker News Reader

Well, now that everyone knows it's feasible to hide a small bomb inside a pager, what's to stop people from checking their pagers for tiny explosives before using them?

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Well nothing which is why people are spreading stuff about it being a hack causing the batteries to explode. Which disrupts everything with a network connection and battery. Adds confusion to the situation.

As I said elsewhere this is a one shot attack. They would never be able to pull this off again at this scale.

Agree on the one shot thing. Makes you wonder if they got what they wanted, and if someone's pulling out their hair over wasting this attack...

It's effects might have been intended as much for psychological as lethal results. This specific vector may be a one-and-done tactic but Hezbollah members would be foolhardy not to regard every electronic device that is, at minimum, younger than $pager_age with suspicion. At this point even if it's a wired copper POTS line I'd be asking the intern to take my calls and shout things out from a few rooms away.

Can the average person tell the difference between a pager battery and a bomb professionally made to look like a pager battery?

You only need to vet what the inside of a pager should look like once, and spread the knowledge around... using them will become more of a hassle, but not entirely impossible.

presumably the only difference between an explosive-laden battery and a normal battery is it's capacity. All else will appear identical. And tearing down the battery to inspect it destroys the battery.

Well usually what you do here is start randomly sampling.

Lot's of pager batteries are the shrink-wrapped cylinders with 2+ cells, so I'm guessing it might be possible to dress up one of those cells as a dummy w/ explosives instead.

The tampered pager likely looks nearly identical, and even un-tampered pagers will vary a little bit from manufacturing. It's possible an expert might be able to visually distinguish that a particular strand of wire is the wrong gauge or the soldering pattern suggests it wasn't made on the appropriate machine, but there shouldn't be something obvious.

Probably not but the average person can buy a pager with a replaceable battery and buy a new one over the counter.

Assuming the stock of replaceable batteries is large enough to handle them all being replaced simultaneously, that the replacement batteries are not likewise compromised, and that the battery is indeed the compromised component.

Realistically just replacing the pagers is not only safer but also probably cheaper.

I'm not sure how many bomb techs they have around, but I'd be pretty afraid to personally open something I suspected to have a bomb in it.

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