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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29665 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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Thousands of walkie-talkies suspected of being used by Hezbollah members have just exploded across Lebanon. These devices use a different supply chain than the pagers that detonated in yesterday’s attack. It appears these walkie-talkies, being larger, carry a significantly larger payload. Hundreds reported wounded. Edit: some early indications iPhones are detonating as well

I am going to ask The Horrible Question. How do you know that the device you're reading this text on, right now, hasn't had a similar sabotage from China or [insert boogieman here?]

$common_brand phones in general? All sorts of people, for all sorts of reasons, have taken them apart and carefully looked at the insides. If there was a significant amount of explosive material, it would've been noticed.

My phone, specifically? I don't, of course. Just like I don't know that I don't have a stalker who's about to murder me, and I don't know the CIA doesn't have cameras in my house! Both of which seem more plausible.

How many people tear open their lithium Ion batteries? Because that seems to be the location of the explosive here.

out of the hundreds of millions of phones sold, i'm confident several have! here's one on youtube: https://youtube.com/watch?v=RTjy2eFHzRc

I don't. Really hoping the CCP never find out how much time I spend talking about the ongoing Uyghur genocide or how much money I've donated to the cause.

The world turning into the "How Not To Be Seen" skit from Monty Python was not on my 2024 Bingo Card...

It is getting even crazier:

Lebanon's official news agency reports that home solar energy systems exploded in several areas of Beirut

https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/lebanons-official-news-agency-reports-home-solar-energy-113809042

I wonder how deep Israel did go. And how much is paranoia/fud now.

Edit: And more! Exploding toasters next?

https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-820703

Unofficial reports claimed that iPhones, video cameras, IC-V82 radios, and other devices also detonated. Unofficial reports also claimed that Hezbollah told its members to dispose of devices containing a lithium battery or that are connected to the internet.

A lot of this is surely just random accidents that gets blamed on Israel right now due to paranoia.

This is absolutely incredible. It’s like a small scale version of what happened to Japan after the second atomic bomb went off.

Allow me to explain; the first atomic bomb going off could have been seen as a one off, or an experiment, or as a luck break from the perspective of the Japanese.

The second one sent a clear message; we have more and we can keep doing this as long as we like.

It really was that second one that sent Japan into capitulation mode.

Now this is not as extreme as atomic bombs of course but the paranoia and fear from this following the pager attack has to be off the charts extreme. There’s absolutely no way of knowing if this is it, or they have something more in stored.

One of the wonders on the internet is that you can go to /r/Lebanon right now and see people freaking out. Apparently lots of residents are frantically disconnecting all of their electronic devices.

Except for a quick stop by Reddit...and then let me check the insta...and...

It's interesting seeing the split in perspective. About half of comments are saying things like "Hezbollah is destroying the country by dragging it into a conflict it clearly can't win" while the other half are along the lines of "This just shows how much we need Hezbollah, to protect us from the evil Zionist entity that would otherwise invade and us and try to take all our land".

And they're all claiming the other side is astroturfed.

The magic of Reddit is that they are probably both right

I don't know if we can say for sure that Israel intended this, but the effects are pretty substantial.

  1. On the eve of a likely conflict, Hezbollah's entire simple comms chain is now suspect or compromised. 80% of modern worn is coordination and logistics. If you can't do that, you lose before you show up.

  2. The level of paranoia is going to go even further off the charts. "They got into the pagers and the walkie talkies, what else are they in?" If your Hezbollah and want to audit everything with a microchip, you can do that, but at the cost of being combat ineffective.

  3. Israel is demonstrating subtly to Iran that they can pull off very sophisticated supply chain attacks. "We know where you are / we know what devices you're using / we know how to hack them."

I can see someone at the Naval Postgraduate School or Army War College writing a big "Grey Zone" theory of combat thesis on this in a few years.

This is a second attack that happened this morning. Not the pager attack from yesterday.

whoops deleted

Wtf. Assumed this was a joke in the friday fun thread or something. It actually happened.

Can't believe they didn't check inside their other equipment after the pagers thing.

What would you check for? I’m pretty electronics literate (simple PCB designs, simple circuit designs, lots of IC use) and I’d have no idea what I was even looking for.

You could just, like -- replace the battery?

That just moves the supply chain attack from the OEM to the second battery supplier. Now you get to carefully inspect those batteries for hidden modifications.

The pagers take normal AAA batteries -- terrorists can go to the drugstore and get them like anyone else.

You could probably find the explosives by x-raying a Hizballah battery a some random guy's battery of the same type.

Explosives have a specific density, I've heard they show up on x-ray the same way cheese does. If you want to give someone a fun time, gift them some oval shaped hard cheese, pack it next to electronics..

No one else has pagers and walkie talkies anymore methinks.

The security guards at my work all carry walkie talkies. I can't badge past a door without someone with a walkie talkie strapped to their belt watching me. I see walkie talkies a hundred times a day.

Waiters. Grocery store security.

...anyone who drives commercially.

I think those are way more long-range than walkie-talkies.

When they say "walkie talkies" i suspect that they're talking about something more like this than the cheap ones that are sold in blister-packs at Wal-Mart.

A lot depends on how sophisticated the attacks are. It's not a lot of explosive (wild-ass-guess, say a hundred grams, on the high side?), but if you crack open a case and there's a weird goop with a couple wires sticking out of it, and the pager still works with said weird goop disconnected, that'd be one thing. If it's either modifying or wholesale replacing components such that it's an integrated part of the device... there's people who could do the necessary disassembly and maybe even code path analysis, but it's well outside of the typical threat model up until now. And in a more extreme case, I could imagine equipment that was normal on disassembly, because the actual threat would be passive and distributed through the plastic shell.

I'm not even sure I'd trust the US military to be able to do that sorta analysis for mission-critical equipment.

If it is true that the explosives were inside the batteries, then there is nothing to see. It would look normal inside.

You could cut apart the battery and compare it to similar batteries. Or blow it up with a sympathetic explosion to see if it has explosives.

Is the theory that batteries were augmented with explosive or are these explosions from thermal runaway of regular lithium batteries? Even a regular lithium fire can be quite explosive if triggered in an enclosed vessel.

In either case shouldn't there be some trace in the battery management system firmware?

In the case where the batteries are internationally being sent into thermal runaway, this must be commanded by the device or BMS firmware. Shouldn't you be able to dump the firmware out and check it's hash against an uncompromised version?

In the other case that the batteries have been augmented with additional explosives, shouldn't the BMS see that the battery has always been under rated capacity. Or in the case where the BMS was set to miss-report capacity, that you should be able to detect it as in the first case.

100% this was explosive charges in batteries. Funny they didn't notice the batteries had a low capacity somehow.

Most consumer devices are locked down in a way that prevents you from dumping the firmware. They’ll have UART disabled completely, or maybe if you’re lucky it might be programmed to support a connection if you provide power to some undocumented pins on the microcontroller.

And assuming you could dump the firmware, you end up with a binary that’s going to be nontrivial to analyze. There’s nothing human readable to give you context clues. Maybe an LLM could help to more quickly analyze, I haven’t tried.

Probably your best bet would be to watch network traffic to the devices, and try to catch it polling Mossad for whether it’s time to explode. But even then they’ve demonstrated the ability to trigger without need for internet access, assuming “walkie talkie” is a mere CB radio.

I wonder if they’ve also tainted Hezbollah ammo supplies, that’s a trick that’s been done before and is also greatly demoralizing.

What I had imagined was that the charge controller was some commercial off the shelf module and you could just compare a binary dump directly from the EPROM to a known good copy. I suppose the battery management could be integrated with the rest of the the devices firmware, and that the firmware is sufficiently localized that you couldn't locate an exact known safe version.

I'm amazed at the sophistication of the infiltration though.

Without getting into describing how to make an explosive out of a battery...a LiPo won't make an explosion, just a big fire.

Yeah, I managed to track down some unconfirmed videos of the reported explosions. It does look larger and more violent than you would get with even the most kinetic LiPo fire. In that case thought, the battery must have been significantly below standard capacity or have the dimensions way out of spec. Maybe that's fine though, like having to pull every radio and pager with a pillowly LiPo out of action effectively dismantles the communication network.

You could cut apart the battery and compare it to similar batteries.

For added fun, you'll need to be careful doing this because lithium battery chemistries have a tendency to spontaneously combust when exposed to oxygen.

I'm betting that's why they were set off today. The best theory I've heard is that Israel planned to activate the pagers during a major campaign against Hezbollah, but Hezbollah started catching on (or the campaign is imminent), so Israel activated the pagers before word got out. Now Hezbollah is probably going through everything to check for bombs, so they set off the walkie-talkies as well.

If it's hard to detect, that's extremely difficult to coordinate on short notice. It's almost literally impossible for an organization that's not all in one location together to suddenly get rid of / replace all of their communication equipment.

It’s also difficult for Hezbollah to communicate right now because a lot of their communication tech just exploded.

Encrypted emails still work.

With what hardware? With what network? Does Hezbollah have the capability to run landlines to every single foxhole? Bugging stationary infrastructure is espionage 101.

I can't believe they didn't strip all their electronics to check for bombs. Basically asking for it.

IIRC it’s a liquid explosive that’s injected into the battery, so there’s nothing physical to check for.

Lol no. That'd mean inventing a whole new type of explosive that can be inside an working battery ?

Why - more likely these are custom made batteries no one thought to x-ray which were modified to have lower capacity and the empty space was taken up by a detonator and explosive. Much simpler.

Bunnie Huang has a not-implausible analysis of the difficulty. I think he underestimates some parts of it, which I'm not going to go into detail here around, but it's still absolutely plausible that the difficult part was setting up the front business and getting sales.

What worries me is that the explosive compound might not exist at all. Maybe this is something that all lithium-ion batteries can do with the right command.

Maybe this is something that all lithium-ion batteries can do with the right command.

Rednecks blowing up batteries would have discovered it by now.

I definitely remember seeing a few news stories of people having their jaws blown off by defective vaporizers.

It happens [cw: images of serious injury to face], but the explosion is pretty characteristic and very different from what we've seen from the pager explosions.

Ah, the old “vape that’s actually a lightsaber” trick.

Come on. Short the battery, see if the effect is just as bad as a normal battery. Use sympathetic detonation to test if it is explosive. Use mass spectroscopy to test the chemical composition.

Other than that, a pretty ballsy power move by Mossad, betting on Hezbollah being to stupid to check for explosives in other electronics after learning that explosives were hidden in some of them.

Then again, any senior commander who personally handles electronics within 24h after learning that some of them had a tendency to explode is simply to trusting to live.

Short the battery

This won't do anything (other than causing a potential fire).

Explosives like that require an initial shock to actually detonate and overheating just sets them on fire (like it can set a regular battery).

If I had to hide an electronically ignited bomb in a battery, I would try to set it up so that a short ignites a primer which will ignite the explosive. Fill an electrical fuse with a primer which is volatile enough that the molten wire sets it off, perhaps?

The alternatives being that you have three leads on your battery (e.g. +, -, boom, where connecting boom with + will cause the explosion.), which is much more noticeable, or having another component which serves as a primer on the PCB near that battery. Of course, 'shorten the battery when receiving a particular message' is not a standard feature of most pagers, so you have to modify or swap the PCB anyhow, and putting the electronic ignition in there might be easier.

I concede that just because a battery is not rigged to explode on short it might still explode in other conditions.

Quite a lot of lipo have more than two leads, starting at a third thermistor wire, going up to per cell voltage leads, and eventually going to annoying Apple bullshit.

And even with two leads, if you're manufacturing a thousand battery-bombs, there's a lot of ways to do a one-wire (and ground) protocol to pass data to a microcontroller, which can easily be the size of a grain of rice. Or you could hard-short the battery leads on a battery without builtin overcurrent protections, and use it as a primary for your real explosives -- even a well-contained lipo fire is definitely hot enough to set off most thermal-ignite explosives.

Explosives like what? AFAIK the pager bombs were triggered by heat rather than shock.

PETN and any other similar explosives with enough power in such small size. At least PETN can be triggered by a spark which is simple enough to generate electronically (you just need a small transformer to produce high voltage and a very short spark gap).

Even if Hezbollah was checking (and we don't know they weren't), this is an extremely fast turn-around. The second tower was hit an hour within the first, and it doesn't really project incompetence that it wasn't protected sooner.

Reminds me of Jack London fiction where a lone genius found a way to explode gun powder remotely

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