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Comment by mcoliver | Hacker News Reader

"The New York Times reported that Israel hid explosive material in the Taiwan-made Gold Apollo pagers before they were imported to Lebanon, citing American and other officials briefed on the operation. The material was implanted next to the battery with a switch that could be triggered remotely to detonate."

Wild

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“Gold Apollo said on Wednesday the pagers that were used in the detonations in Lebanon on Tuesday were not made by it but by a company called BAC which has a licence to use its brand.”

They spun up a whole company

Not surprising. Recall how two Taiwanese companies were implicated when they reportedly had their device driver signing key "stolen", in the creation of Stuxnet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet#Windows_infection [2] https://youtu.be/Fqk_VUMzY_M?si=H64JCMMCzY-k7Y1K&t=823

Apparently they were branded Gold Apollo but not made by Gold Apollo:

Gold Apollo said on Wednesday the pagers that were used in the detonations in Lebanon on Tuesday were not made by it but by a company called BAC which has a licence to use its brand.

…

The company said in a statement that the AR-924 model was produced and sold by BAC.

"We only provide brand trademark authorization and have no involvement in the design or manufacturing of this product," the statement said.

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/gold-apollo-says-i...

They tampered with thousands of devices. Created a whole production run of them and kept it under wraps. Wild indeed.

Did they have Mossad agents doing grunt work on the assembly line? All it takes is one spy working on the assembly line to relay how the malicious pagers look like to make the operation a waste.

That's not even required. I've been a line worker assembling boards for a medical device manufacturer. I did not know what every single component did. The process was created at levels above me.

>citing American and other officials briefed on the operation.

How far should I be reading into the fact that people outside of Israel leaked this info so quickly? Does it mean the US was very unhappy with the attack? I doubt they were happy with not being given a heads up.

It probably just means that they weren't given any advanced warning and don't want any blame for it.

The capacity to keep secrets, even at the state level, takes a level of mental maturity that few are capable of. So many are thrilled by the idea of knowing something few other people know to a degree that they paradoxically want to make it something everybody knows. Journalists take advantage of this and collect and share leaky sources amongst each other. The reason for the leaking is most likely just human nature.

That said, the existence of the state of Israel is such a contentious topic that the leakers may have been motivated by politics as well as the above, sure. But I doubt state-level agencies are condoning the leaking here.

> So many are thrilled by the idea of knowing something few other people know to a degree that they paradoxically want to make it something everybody knows

Some people (often due to trauma) have a very different relationship with secrets than you describe. Some people get immense satisfaction from holding secrets, and have no issue keeping it that way. Sometimes those people have other flaws or vices, as often plays out. In my understanding, managing such people is its own meta-game within these professions

I won't disagree with you about some people liking to keep secrets just as much as others like to spill them, but could you give an example of how trauma would cause someone to want to do the former?

Could be damage control. There were rumors that it was the lithium ion batteries being made to explode. If those rumors were widely believed true, that would damage iPhone and Android and other brands.

That is pretty similar to what has been guessed so far. The posters here speculated that the charge was concealed inside the battery. Also some reports said that the batteries themselves heated up triggering the explosives. does the report mention if this was a physical switch or just some sort of control circuit?

The majority of plastic based high explosives are designed to be very stable, and require both heat and pressure to detonate, so my educated guess is they implanted something along the lines of a blasting cap into the pagers. I’ve seen PETN mentioned, but again, that is designed to be stable.

So trigger some kind of process to cause the batteries to overheat + detonate the blasting cap after a short delay? I'd be interested to know how it was packaged if it was done in a way that wouldn't look suspicious if someone looked inside the pager. The bomb-in-the- battery theory is a good one.

Realistically it wouldn’t require much volume in the battery. For reference, the amount of explosive material in a blasting cap is about the size of an eraser head, and is easily capable of the explosions in the videos.

> So trigger some kind of process to cause the batteries to overheat

Where are you getting this part from? There's no evidence that the batteries were triggered to overheat; indeed doing so would be counter-productive, as it would cause the people holding the devices to know something is wrong and potentially move them farther away from their own body. The pagers exploded suddenly without warning. The only trigger/detonation involved was setting off the high explosive. The battery was uninvolved, only used to make the pager itself work.

>it would cause the people holding the devices to know something is wrong and potentially move them farther away from their own body

Because early reports suggest this is exactly what happened in some cases.

Plastic explosives are impact and heat stable. It takes an electric charge or blast cap to detonate them based on which compound is being used.

Electrical charge? There are electrically initiated caps, but you can’t place a negative and positive charge into a stick of C4 and expect it to do anything.

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