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Comment by clueless | Hacker News Reader

so how does one verify that the battery in their iphone doesn't contain explosives?

As long as it doesn’t say “made in Hungary”

And on a more serious note. Hizbolla is a blacklisted terrorist org, they can’t just order stuff from regular factories. Buying from an anonymous white label factory in Hungary with no address and little information is probably pretty normal from them - because anyone doing business with them in the EU will go to jail

As long as you’re not buying electronics from shady factories with no known owners you’ll be fine

> As long as you’re not buying electronics from shady factories with no known owners you’ll be fine

For now and to our knowledge so far.

Exactly. The EU designates Hezbolla as a terrorist group. It is illegal for EU to sell to them.

Well, are you a member of a terrorist group? If no, then odds are that nobody is going to go through the trouble of adding explosives to your phone's battery.

In this case the people responsible must have discovered where these terrorists were buying their devices. Since basically no one except for them was buying large quantities of these, they were easy to target.

Have you angered Mossad? If no, you are almost certainly fine. If yes, you are already dead.

James Mickens explained this clearly a decade ago.

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf

You cannot answer any security questions without a threat model. Are you worried about your neighbor putting a bomb in your phone? Mossad isn't putting bombs in random phones.

X-Ray image compared to known X-Ray of the exact same model

Bomb sniffing dog or chemical test of surfaces

Allegedly hidden well enough that a casual X-ray of the pager wouldn't have revealed it.

It might have looked like a normal pager under xray, but I bet it looked _different_ than an unmodified pager. Not suspicious on its own but suspicious because it was changed.

Interesting that it wasn't discovered by any bomb sniffing dog in Lebanon. They had thousands of devices. There must be at least a few bomb dogs in Lebanon right?

Simply because "bomb" dogs, like "drug" dogs are a scam to give the police a legal excuse to violate your rights. The dogs don't detect bombs/drugs, they detect cues from the controlling officer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detection_dog#Criticism

  The law was reviewed in 2006 by the New South Wales Ombudsman, who handed down a critical report regarding the use of dogs for drug detection. The report stated that prohibited drugs were found in only 26% of searches following an indication by a drug sniffer dog. Of these, 84% were for small amounts of cannabis deemed for personal use.[27]: 29  Subsequent figures obtained from NSW Police in 2023 revealed that between 1 January 2013 and 30 June 2023, officers had conducted 94,535 personal searches (refers to both strip searches and less invasive frisk or "general" searches) resulting from drug detection dog indications, with only 25% resulting in illicit drugs being found.[28]

Bomb sniffing dogs can't detect every explosive compound under the sun. They're trained on some of the most common ones but there are almost infinite variations of explosive chemistries.

"According to Sky News Arabia; Mossad was able to Inject a Compound of Pentaerythritol Tetranitrate (PETN) into the Batteries of the New Encrypted Pagers that Hezbollah began using around February, before they even arrived in the Hands of Hezbollah Members, allowing them to Remotely Overheat and Detonate the Lithium Battery within the Device."

I am extremely skeptical.

High explosives rarely require only heat to detonate, and most can be quite literally set on fire by an open flame and burn without detonating. PETN is not terribly sensitive, and should require a detonator of some sort. What's more, that doesn't jive with the other claim that they added a daughterboard to the device.

This report came out 4 hours after the first attack.

I'm very skeptical of a report about a specific compound and method 4 hours after an attack - Its not enough time for analysis

If that's true, then does that make electric vehicles into potential car bombs if "the right thing" is injected into the battery?

This wasn't something magical that turned the battery into an explosive, they allegedly injected an explosive compound into the battery which would be triggered by intentionally overheating the battery.

Like if you packed C4 into an electric car battery, it would be a bomb, much the same way if you packed it into an ordinary empty box. Sure the battery adds some extra energy, but the explosive is the explosive, ya know.

If you add explosives to a car, it becomes a potential car bomb, yes. Doesn't matter what the power source is.

how the hell is anyone going to be able to fly anymore?

the idea TSA security has always been a farce, detecting only the crudest methods of attack.

The mechanism of action is unclear at this time. I’ve seen it written that the explosives were part of PCBs with electronics that mimicked the original.

It was an addon board with explosives on it which was attached to the existing normal circuit board.

Was there enough empty space in the device for this? Were other components removed or miniaturized?

It was a few lines in a news article, so unknown.

But you can see photos of the same model of pager and it's an LCD screen in a plastic shell, the kind that seems like there would be room on the inside for a little addon board to be attached to the existing board.

The supply chain for an iPhone is much stronger than for a Gold Alpha pager, and it's likely that the same thing will end up being true of these ICOM radios: they'll turn out to be designed and branded by ICOM, but actually manufactured and distributed by some random Eastern European outfit that paid to use ICOM as a skinsuit. That would never happen with an Apple device.

It is likely that they were authentic Icom devices. My understanding is that it is common for commercial radios to be programmed by distributor. Or Gold Alpha gave a good deal on pagers and radios and then were intercepted from warehouse.

I don't think Icom would ever put name on generic radio, they make all their radios in Japan. It is like Toyota putting name on another car.

There's lots of Toyotas in this list[1] in both directions. Toyota is happy to build cars with other people's names on them, as well as put their name on a car someone else built.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_badge-engineered_veh...

I read that Icom V82 is discontinued and most available are counterfeit.

Toyota puts their engines in other cars all the time.

> The supply chain for an iPhone is much stronger

Probably not strong enough to make it unreachable by a sophisticated agency like the Mossad.

I think the most likely outcome here is that all these devices were intercepted from the same firm.

With enough time, effort, and money? Sure.

But that would be many orders of magnitude more difficult that what they pulled off here, which was already very impressively difficult to pull off.

Israel has shown us (again) that we cannot trust any device whose full supply chain hasn't been properly audited. Which you can't really do at this scale.

So yeah, literally anything you buy can apparently just be stuffed full of explosives waiting to kill you and anyone near you.

Yes. Explosives can be placed in any device that has a small cavity. This has always been true....

It just hasn't been likely.

Replace it.

As I understand, Hezbollah reactively replacing their phones was the exact thing that made yesterday's attack possible.

Replace the battery, not the device.

Imagine if the Russians managed to do something like this in the US...

Start with "do I work for Terrorist organization?"

Don't be a part of a terrorist organization and if you are - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bring_your_own_device

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