Nine people are dead and nearly 3,000 others wounded after thousands of pagers simultaneously exploded in the Middle East on Tuesday.
The coordinated attack targeted the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah, and saw the small devices go off at around 15:30 local time across Lebanon and Syria.
It’s thought the pagers – used because they were harder to track than smartphones – were booby-trapped by Israeli intelligence personnel with explosives that were triggered when a message was received.
The attack has raised fears across social media that smartphones could be targeted next.
Speaking to MailOnline, experts have revealed whether or not this is a possibility – and how to tell if a newly-purchased smartphone is safe.
Hezbollah has blamed Israel for the ‘sinful aggression’, and said the country will get its ‘fair punishment’. Israel is yet to comment. Pictured, parts of an exploded pager with Gold Apollo branding
The attack has raised fears across social media that smartphones which are much widely used than pagers could be targeted next
People have flooded to social media claiming that ‘smartphones are next’ and ‘any electronic device can be used like a bomb’.
One commentator said ‘if pagers can be hacked to explode, cell phones will be next’.
Some reports have suggested a cyber hack by Israel triggered battery overheating and a sudden combustion event, but an expert thinks this ‘unlikely’.
Instead, it may just be a case of whether a device has been physically tampered with or not.
Widely used in the 1990s, pagers are small wireless telecommunications devices that beep or vibrate when receiving transmissions from others.
A screen on the pager shows alphanumeric messages, such as a telephone number for the person carrying the device to call.
One-way pagers only receive messages, while response pagers and two-way pagers also acknowledge and reply to messages using an internal transmitter.
Dr Lukasz Olejnik, visiting senior research fellow of Department of War Studies of King’s College London, agreed that pagers are now a ‘niche’ technology but are still useful in emergency situations or ‘really specialised uses’.
‘Pagers were used for reasons of operational security to limit the risk of eavesdropping or tracking,’ Dr Olejnik told MailOnline.
‘Pagers have smaller attack surface than smartphones – it’s much more difficult to hack them.’
According to Dr Olejnik, smartphones could potentially be targeted in these sorts of attacks instead of pagers, except ‘smartphones could be tracked more easily’.
People have flooded to social media claiming that ‘smartphones are next’ and ‘any electronic device can be used like a bomb’
Social media commentators think phones ‘will be next’ – but an expert doesn’t think we need to be concerned about our devices exploding
It’s widely believed the pagers were booby-trapped by Israeli intelligence personnel with explosives. Some reports have suggested a cyber hack triggered battery overheating and a sudden combustion event (without the use of explosives) but an expert thinks this ‘unlikely’
This image posted on social media on September 17, 2024, appears to show an explosion and a man falling to the floor (L) while others take cover at an indoor vegetable market in Beirut, as hundreds of pagers used by Hezbollah members exploded across Lebanon
Pagers are handheld devices smaller than smartphones that Hezbollah and others in Lebanon use to send messages. Around 15:30 local time on Tuesday, thousands of handheld pagers used by Hezbollah, a Lebanese political party and militant group, simultaneously exploded across Lebanon and Syria. At least nine were killed and over 2,750 wounded
A man is injured after his pager exploded in Beirut, Lebanon. Lebanese media outlets and Sky News Arabia report that Israel managed to hack the portable pagers and cause them to explode
But the academic added that there ‘is no risk that someone explodes your smartphone’.
‘Most modern smartphones are constructed in ways that such tampering could be anywhere from very difficult to nearly impossible,’ he said.
If you are ‘paranoid’, he suggests using an explosive material detector on your phone and buying ‘directly from vendors only’, such as Apple, rather than second-hand vendors.
Dr Olejnik added that this extremely rare scenario and it’s ‘not like we’re going to have just about any electronic devices explode on a common basis’.
‘It is simply extremely unlikely – this thing in Lebanon is an operation and it required resources such as money, people, etc.’
Dr Olejnik calls the theory flooding social media that a cyber hack triggered battery overheating and combustion – so without any implanted explosives – ‘unlikely’.
Photos from the Middle East show the exploded remains of pagers branded with Gold Apollo, a Taiwanese pager manufacturer.
But Gold Apollo said it had licensed out its brand to a Budapest company called BAC Consulting and was not involved in the production of the devices.
Based on the available footage, experts believe the pagers were inserted with explosives that triggered the simultaneous blasts somewhere along the supply chain before they ended up with Hezbollah members.
A security source told Reuters that up to 3g of explosives were hidden in the pagers and had gone ‘undetected’ by Hezbollah for months.
Photos from the Middle East show the exploded remains of pagers are branded with Gold Apollo, a Taiwanese pager manufacturer
A police officer inspects a blood-stained car in which a hand-held pager exploded, in Beirut, Lebanon
A pager is a small electronic device which you can carry around with you and which gives you a number or a message when someone is trying to contact you (file photo)
Olav Lysne, a Norway-based computer scientist, agrees that this attack was done through interception of the supply chain.
‘Most experts now seem to guess that the equipment was sent from the provider fully intact, but that the shipment was intercepted, and that explosives along with trigger functionality was inserted while the equipment was in shipment,’ he told MailOnline.
‘Your phone can definitely be tampered with. Still, the likelihood that someone have placed explosives in it is extremely small unless you are the target of a resourceful intelligence agency.’
Josep Jornet, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern University, thinks the pagers were tampered with so that they’d explode when they received a certain message.
‘Somewhere between the manufacturer and the user someone had access to these pagers,’ Professor Jornet told Northeastern Global News.
‘And they did not just modify the software, they would make it react in the presence of a specific message.
‘They also added a tiny explosive next to the battery, so that the reaction would not just be a battery blowing up, it would be the actual pagers exploding.’
A person is carried on a stretcher outside American University of Beirut Medical Center (AUBMC) as people, including Hezbollah fighters and medics, were wounded and killed when the pagers they use to communicate exploded
N.R. Jenzen-Jones, an expert in military arms and director of Armament Research Services in Australia, thinks explosive devices were integrated into the pagers early.
‘The scale suggests a complex supply-chain attack, rather than a scenario in which devices were intercepted and modified in transit,’ he posted on X.
Lebanon’s foreign ministry called the explosions an ‘Israeli cyberattack’ but did not provide details on how it had reached that conclusion.
Harjinder Singh Lallie, director of the University of Warwick’s cybersecurity centre, called it a ‘very sophisticated espionage attack’ with ‘potentially serious ramifications’.
‘Pagers appear to have been intersected modified and distributed without anybody noticing any problems in the supply chain,’ he said.
‘This sets a very dangerous precedent – for example equipment owned by ministers and other important personal could be modified.’
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