Hezbollah thought going back to using pagers would help them
Only thing they went and got new pagers - pagers used by Hezbollah members were equipped with lithium batteries, which were likely responsible for the explosions - With batteries, a chain reaction called thermal runaway can cause the battery to generate even more heat and eventually catch fire or explode - the handheld pagers system was detonated using advanced technology that technology we don't know about
if malware was used, which some say was used, you could potentially gain access to a device's battery management system, which controls charging and discharging, and issue commands to rapidly overcharge the battery or prevent it from regulating heat dissipation properly. This could lead to the battery overheating and potentially catching fire or exploding.
If a Hezbollah pager shipment was intercepted that malware coulda then been put on they pagers - again some say that happened
@llondel yes if they devices weren't tampered with
that's where the malware comes into play though.
malware can override they safeguards to allow you to then do something bad
Devices overheat all the time and have been known to catch fire, even explode, not hard to imagine a tampered device actually being used as a weapon.....
Again its all speculation anyway
@ecksmc Looks like they had explosives added, based on seeing reports elsewhere. Probably triggered by paging with a particular number, pager software modified to detonate some number of seconds after receiving the page (given the reports of beeping first). Quite a sophisticated preparation to manage that.
@llondel yeah, i had seen they rumours
And apparently the batteries were used as the detonator - the pagers were intercepted and small amount of explosive put inside along with a mini trigger with batteries as detonator
@ecksmc With a properly-designed circuit, you wouldn't be able to cause it with malware because there would be no mechanism for it. A poorly-designed circuit is not something you want out there for general sale in case someone else accidentally trips it. If they all went off at pretty much the same time, I would assume there was a deliberate mechanism in there - random overheating wouldn't guarantee an explosion due to slight differences in the batteries.