This is more simple than that. They’re sending a malicious payload to the target numbers which causes the pager to heat up the battery and explode. Nothing manufacturing related.
I would love to see a detailed technical explanation for how this would be possible.
I design battery-powered electronics for a living and I can’t think of any design that would let a battery explode with the violence these did, let alone on command. Unless it were deliberate.
Same here. Like, there has to be some kind of specific vulnerability in these pagers, right? You can’t just “heat up the battery,” you need something that will actually use the power. If the pagers weren’t compromised between the manufacturer and the recipients, then there’s some major fuckery afoot.
Best I can get is figuring out a way to reuse some pins on the uc to isolate two or three caps to use as voltage pumps and then dump the whole thing at once into the battery.
I somehow suspect Electroboom is going to get a lot of new viewers in the next few days
Reading a bit more into it, seems all of them were Motorola pagers, so they had to have exploited the li-on charging pins to either create a loop or spam different voltage signals via their payload. Regardless, it’s a truly impressive exploit.
Being in IT and having worked on asics, breadboard design, lsf, dgx and others for a storage chip design company, it’s not exactly rocket science to overload a small battery so much it heats up above 140’'F/60’C that it combusts.
This is more simple than that. They’re sending a malicious payload to the target numbers which causes the pager to heat up the battery and explode. Nothing manufacturing related.
I would love to see a detailed technical explanation for how this would be possible.
I design battery-powered electronics for a living and I can’t think of any design that would let a battery explode with the violence these did, let alone on command. Unless it were deliberate.
Same here. Like, there has to be some kind of specific vulnerability in these pagers, right? You can’t just “heat up the battery,” you need something that will actually use the power. If the pagers weren’t compromised between the manufacturer and the recipients, then there’s some major fuckery afoot.
Best I can get is figuring out a way to reuse some pins on the uc to isolate two or three caps to use as voltage pumps and then dump the whole thing at once into the battery.
I somehow suspect Electroboom is going to get a lot of new viewers in the next few days
Reading a bit more into it, seems all of them were Motorola pagers, so they had to have exploited the li-on charging pins to either create a loop or spam different voltage signals via their payload. Regardless, it’s a truly impressive exploit.
Being in IT and having worked on asics, breadboard design, lsf, dgx and others for a storage chip design company, it’s not exactly rocket science to overload a small battery so much it heats up above 140’'F/60’C that it combusts.
Here’s the initial report:
https://www.lbcgroup.tv/news/lebanon-news/796406/understanding-the-pager-and-how-it-can-explode/en