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Comment by elteto | Hacker News Reader

This almost reads like science fiction, what an incredible attack from a technical POV. A couple of thoughts:

1. The beepers were compromised and have been for a long time. I don't know how easy it is to exfiltrate data from them if they are receive-only devices. At any rate it shows that Israel is capable of intercepting and manipulating low-tech comms. What's left for Hezbollah to use?

2. The next step is to hack into hospital record systems and get a list of all patients admitted today.

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> 1. The beepers were compromised and have been for a long time.

Where did you see this? Sources are saying that Hezbollah recently upgraded their pagers with the American University of Beirut on August 29:

https://x.com/gazanotice/status/1836082218805891360

Why would Israel have the ability to wipe out a good chunk of Hezbollah for years and just sat on it until now?

They are claiming 2750 injuries:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/9/17/dozens-of-hezbollah...

I wasn't thinking years, but months but I didn't know about the recent upgrade. At any rate, if the pagers allowed any data exfiltration they have been collecting that data since whenever the last upgrade was.

The reason for using pagers instead of phones is that they are receivers only, they do not transmit, therefore they cannot be localized.

So no data exfiltration was possible using the pagers. The only purpose of the modified pagers was to maim or kill their possessors, by detonating all of them simultaneously.

Some kinds of receivers can be localized because they convert input frequencies to a standard internal frequency for more convenient processing. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superheterodyne_receiver#Local...

It's how the TV detectors work in countries, such as the UK, that charge a license fee for TVs.

Military radios can't use this common technique because of the risk of detection.

I suspect pagers only receive on 1 or at most a few frequencies. If that's correct, they wouldn't need that technique.

It is still way more difficult to localize a local oscillator (especially one that's trying even slightly to shield itself) than something trying to transmit to a tower a few miles away.

We are talking tiny signals here, modern RF frontends don't leak meaningful amounts of RF, otherwise it would knacker batterylife.

So they missed incapacitating a hospital, which changed to smart phones. Are you sure it was Mossad?

> Hezbollah recently upgraded their pagers with the American University of Beirut

Please do not conflate Hezbollah and AUB.

The claim is that AUB medical school pagers were replaced a week or so ago. This is either pure coincidence, false or fake news to imply that AUB has Israeli operatives, or indeed that the pagers used were compromised and that the USA was aware of the impending attack and did not want to harm AUB medical staff - who probably are mostly not connected with Hezbollah.

Further reading: https://x.com/AUBMC_Official/status/1836086847153320148

This makes an assumption that Israel cares about making it's list of targets as small as possible. Israel has shown over and over again that it is happy casting a very wide net when labelling people as legitimate targets, using fuzzy machine learning to label large numbers of people without any direct evidence. Israel also has a higher acceptance of the deaths of innocents than any other western aligned & supplied nation, literally happy if dozens or more civilians are killed in order to kill one member of Hamas or Hezbollah. They or their proxies then blame their opponents for the deaths of innocents, ignoring that the accepted rules of war are that civilian deaths should be minimized.

For sources, search for "Israel Lavender system" and pick your media source of choice.

Unfortunately innocent people were also harmed, don’t think a straight list will serve anyone

Honestly I doubt Israel/Mossad doesn’t know who is in Hezbollah, i think this is more of a direct attack (obviously) mixed with scare/terror benefit

I think the value is in knowing the network and cross-reference against it. Innocent bystanders or people who happened to just go to the hospital today will probably fall off during this process. Not to mention that you can filter out by the type of injury to get a more accurate list.

Its quite simple to filter out Hesbolah from those injured. If it is fighting age male, then he is Hesbloah.

Yikes the "list of patients" thing is scariest part of all of this: if they feed that into some monster AI that creates new targets... I can only imagine the diminishing accuracy of who is really deserving of being targets

But that is exactly what modern AI-era big data warfare would look like. By its nature, and by choice, less accuracy / more innocent targets, but oh well

It’s hard to believe none of these beepers have failed before this and the explosives found by a beeper repair person

I heard a story according to which a similar scheme was used in the Algerian war of independence, so these is more retro than scifi. Radio sets were left by the French military for the Algerians to grab. The explosive was hidden in the frame and components, and the trigger was a specific audio frequency. The device looked exactly like a stock military radio set if you disassembled it. So it's not that scifi.

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