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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29675 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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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.

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