Dozens injured as Hezbollah pagers simultaneously explode - reports - i24NEWS
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According to reports, at least 10 Hezbollah operatives were injured after the hand-held communications devices they held blew up in Dahieh, Beirut • Similiar incidents reported throughout country
  • tal@lemmy.today
    English
    163·
    17 days ago

    I’m kind of guessing, from the strength of the explosion in the video – it really was a small explosion, not bursting into flames – that somehow rigged pagers were inserted into Hezbollah’s equipment prior to distribution to operatives.

    But if this was, instead, some kind of remote software compromise of battery management system firmware for lithium batteries, now I have one more thing to worry about in my life, with all the devices with lithium batteries I have.

    looks warily at laptop on my chest

    EDIT: Strengthening my concerns, in the CNN article I linked to in my other comment, the devices were termed “hacked” by Lebanese internal security forces. Now, okay, that’s a report immediately after the event, and I don’t know how much time they have had to actually do analysis. Or if they’re right. But:

    NNA reported that “hacked” pager devices exploded in the towns of Ali Al-Nahri and Riyaq in Lebanon’s central Beqaa valley, resulting in a significant number of injuries. The locations are Hezbollah strongholds.

    …it sure doesn’t assuage my concerns at all. Even if you couldn’t make a BMS discharge lithium batteries hard enough to explode, you definitely can make them do so hard enough to make a pretty unpleasant fire. You do that with numerous laptop-sized devices all over a country, that’d potentially be a pretty unpleasant event.

    sighs

    Maybe it’s possible to mandate that lithium-ion devices conforming to some sort of safety certification standard, like UL or something, have non-updatable-firmware hardware putting a physical limit on discharge rate. I don’t think that that’d add too much cost or too many restrictions to devices.

    EDIT2: From this YouTube video, it sounds like as long as you’re not using sketchy battery cells in the device you’re building, that battery manufacturers already take this into consideration via a blowout hole:

    Even in the event of a short circuit, genuine lithium-ion batteries have several protective measures to prevent them from catching on fire. Take a look at this lithium-ion that was just shorted out. In the unlikely case that a battery short-circuits, the terminals heat up and the electrolyte fluid begins to boil. The vent holes in the top of the terminal allow the battery to depressurize the electrolyte steam, thereby reducing the battery capacity and making a pressure explosion much less likely. In the end, you’re more-likely to see a small fire shoot out of a battery than a large explosion. While they still can cause damage, it’s a much better option than having a battery explode, which results in a shrapnel cloud. But in counterfeit batteries, this vent hole safety valve is often ineffective.

    All that being said, I wouldn’t be surprised if I have some devices with sketchy cells…but my guess is that at least in my collection, when it comes to large-battery-capacity, Internet-connected devices capable of firmware updates, stuff like laptops, they’re probably – hopefully – using legit battery cells.

    • vsis@feddit.clEnglish
      17·
      17 days ago

      I don’t believe small lithium batteries can explode like that. Not even big car batteries explode like that. They make a big fire but not this kind of explosion.

      Either explosives were implanted somehow by IDF in the supply chain, or Hezbollah is crazy enough to put explosives there, just in case the devices fall in enemy hands, and IDF learned that and trigger the explosions remotely.

      • tal@lemmy.today
        English
        1·
        16 days ago

        I don’t believe small lithium batteries can explode like that.

        If it’s an 18650, which is a pretty common small lithium cell, it looks like it can. Here’s one exploding after being shorted:

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDaPP-dI9dE

        That being said:

        • The cells cannot themselves have current regulation sufficient to avoid a fire or explosion. My vague understanding from past reading is that typically, if you buy an 18650, it’ll have internal regulation, but not all do – it adds to the cost and reduces capacity. But you’d only want an unregulated 18650 if you were putting it in a device that you would trust to regulate the thing. I believe I was reading about it in the past in the context of high-end flashlights that took removable 18650s, was telling people not to try and use unregulated 18650s, as then you’re trusting the flashlight’s firmware to properly limit the discharge rate.

        • The battery would have to be the first point to go if the external BMS circuitry just let the thing discharge as quickly as possible. Like, if you had small-enough connections or something, I’d imagine that they’d melt first, act like a fuse.

        • From the video I read above, lithium batteries from reputable manufacturers tend to have blowout holes to prevent exactly this – if the electrolyte starts to boil, then they’ll start venting vapor. They may catch fire from the heat, but it should prevent the pressure buildup from reaching the point where the battery explodes. They say that counterfeit cells may not have vents that work correctly.

        So I can believe that there are devices out there at risk. But I would guess that most devices probably aren’t. That is, you could maybe make devices catch fire, and that could be bad if done at mass scale at the same time, but probably most wouldn’t explode.

        Even on that above 18650 that exploded, you could see vapor coming out prior to the explosion. According to that video I linked above about exploding lithium batteries, it sounds like the issue is more that on some counterfeits, the pressure release system doesn’t work properly rather than that it doesn’t exist at all – I didn’t quote the text, but they went more into depth on it after the bit I quoted. But I suppose that if there were no presssure release at all, that it could probably get more pressure buildup before exploding.

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      8·
      17 days ago

      Israeli secret services used exploding phone previously, it’s not a stretch to assume that they tapped into supply chain of pagers and brought a pallet of pagers with a low tens of grams sized bomb inside

      also lithium batteries don’t explode like that

    • floofloof@lemmy.caEnglish
      6·
      17 days ago

      I wonder whether they exploded exactly at the same time. If so, it seems less likely it would have been an attack via the batteries since you wouldn’t expect them all to heat up and explode at the exact same rate.

  • Nurse_Robot@lemmy.worldEnglish
    24·
    17 days ago

    Warning: graphic images

    My guy a table is not a graphic image

    Edit: I didn’t realize there were multiple images