The breaking news for the past couple of days across the world has been the pager and walkie-talkie blasts held by thousands of Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon. A cyber kinetic explosion using Internet of Things (IoT)/electronics devices of this magnitude will impact all countries and citizens in many ways in future. In this article, I am going to talk about what happened, who did it, why and how they did it, and its consequences, based on the information available in open source media.
More than 5000 pagers detonated around the same time (around 3.30 PM in Lebanon) on the 17th September 2024, killing 12 people and seriously injuring over 3000 others. The next morning, hundreds of Walkie-Talkies exploded, killing 20 people and seriously injuring 450 people. There were also reports of explosions of solar, biometric devices and electric vehicles. Almost all of them belonged to the United Nations declared terrorist group Hezbollah.
It is widely suspected that Israel’s spy agency Mossad is behind all this. The reason for this is the decades long enmity between Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah group. The Hezbollah group was founded in 1982 by Lebanese mullahs with the sole purpose to fight against Israel. In 1997, the United Nations declared Hezbollah a terrorist organization. It is said that Hezbollah now has more than 100,000 soldiers and more than 120,000 rocket missiles. It controls the government of Lebanon and is fighting alongside Iran in Syria’s civil war. Hezbollah has launched thousands of rocket missile attacks on the northern part of the Israel since last October, forcing more than 60,000 Israeli citizens to flee their homes. Israel is now trying to convince Hezbollah to stop the rocket attacks this way after failed negotiations for all these time.
How was this cyber kinetic war/attack carried out?
In the past few years, Israel has killed several key Hezbollah and Hamas officials after tracking them down through their smartphone usage. So about 6 months ago a senior Hezbollah official issued an order to stop using smartphones and switch to pagers for mutual communication and awarded a contract for the purchase of 5000 pagers and walkie-talkies to a Hungarian-based firm, who in turn bought them from a Taiwanese firm. Israel’s spy agency somehow found out about this and installed a plastic explosive material called PETN in one of the lithium batteries of all those pagers and walkie-talkies and a software/firmware update to activate it with the help of a message without anyone suspecting it. Hezbollah distributed these pagers to its top military officers and commanders. On this 17th, a alpha numeric message was sent to all these pagers, as soon as the trigger message was received, the pager made a sound and exploded due to extreme heat.
What are the consequences of this event?
- Hezbollah and Iran could counterattack Israel and cost of everything will go high, starting with oil.
- Terrorist groups can use this method in future to instill fear in people, PETN was first used by a shoe bomber to blow up a plane, after that incident we were made to take off our shoes for screening at airports.
- Globalization and Global Supply Chain Management will be hit hard. As you all know China is the manufacturing hub of the world and has 33% to 90% market share in electronics, battery, solar industry and export market. Henceforth all countries can switch to products manufactured in their country or allied countries for safety reasons. India also needs to show speed in reducing its dependence on China for electronic devices and batteries.
- Smartphones, computers and other electronic devices can now be banned or their use and Wi-Fi facility may get banned in the aircraft.
- Hardware (firmware) cannot be easily tested like a software, so this can be a big headache for security organizations across the world.
Visit my Cyber War article to understand how a real cyber war looks like.