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?
@0x56 I am seriously fascinated by this.
@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 @kel
It's really impressive and clever that people did this. Very targeted, very effective.