I didn't realize a pager had enough volatile elements to kill... Sure a battery could explode and burn a little, but to kill? Who's injecting antimatter into the batteries?
@janallmac @0x56 ...and my mobile device. 👀
@kel @0x56
When my laptop caught fire a while ago due to the battery, my son, with his natural-born smartassery, told me I'd been hacked.
And then my husband was like no, he's fucking with you.
It really does seem like hacksploding is a thing! Cool AF, and well done... but it makes me wonder if we can do it to them, what's stopping them from doing it to us?
@janallmac @kel - "what's stopping them from doing it to us?"
A) all the pagers were the same make/model so there's only one combination of exploits to learn/execute.
B) dumb pagers have limited firmware patching capability, unlike smart devices
C) you probably haven't ticked off somebody who's willing to spend a dozen man-years researching a combination of exploits like this
@janallmac @kel - a) yes and no. Most Smart devices have lots of different configuration options that might change the attack vector enough to limit it. And there's lots of different consumer options for any single class of device (how many smart doorbells are there for instance)
@0x56 More to the point... Pager? Did mobile phones not make them obsolete 20 years ago?
@0x56 Scratch that! I'm up-to-date with the story now!
@0x56
I have similar questions. How are pagers made to explode remotely? And why do they explode at all?
@MPCavalier - I could imagine a scenario where you advise a battery too much causing it to overheat and blow up...
@0x56 @MPCavalier
"Advise a battery?"
now that's just funny.
"Battery, let me tell you something, just us girls. That guy whose dick you're next to? He's an asshole! Wait til you hear what he did to the last battery he dated..."
@janallmac @MPCavalier - lol, bad typo, should have been abuse
Oooohhhhh
OK I don't really get it either way. But someone, somehow, pissed off some batteries.
@0x56 I am seriously fascinated by this.