Pagers likely booby-trapped by explosive charge during delivery, cyber-security expert says

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00:00Militant group Hezbollah is tonight warning that it will get just retribution
00:04as it blames Israel for a spree of pager blasts across Lebanon. The attack has
00:10left nine people dead and up to 3,000 more injured, among them the Iranian
00:15ambassador to Beirut. The detonations came just hours after Israel announced
00:19that it was broadening the aims of its war in Gaza to include its fight against
00:24Hezbollah along the border with Lebanon. With the latest here's Rawad Taha in
00:29Beirut.
00:33I'm standing here in front of the emergency entrance for the American
00:37University of Beirut Medical Center where more than 200 injured people have
00:42been transported from various areas in Beirut and Beirut's southern suburbs as
00:47a result of the pagers attack that occurred later this afternoon in Lebanon.
00:53Now as a wrap-up thousands of pager devices primarily used by Hezbollah
00:59members and Hezbollah officials exploded between the time of 3.30 p.m. and 4 p.m.
01:04Beirut time. This resulted in more than 2,750 injured people as of the latest
01:12official death toll by the Ministry of Health along with more than 10 killed
01:16including a number of civilians and including a number of sons of Hezbollah
01:23parliament members. Now this is still an unfolding story the number of injured of
01:30those injured as I mentioned is very large. Most hospitals in Lebanon are
01:35pre-occupied and are at full capacity. Calls for blood donations were set up in
01:41different areas in Beirut and in Lebanon's south. This is the scene for
01:49today close to a science fiction movie one can say. Rawat Taha reporting there
01:55from Beirut. Well to discuss what may have been behind these mysterious blasts
01:59we're joined now by Jérôme Billoy, cyber security expert for consultancy firm
02:05Wavestone. Thank you so much for being with us on the program this evening
02:09Jérôme. Footage that we've seen coming from Lebanon appears to show that some
02:15of these detonations took place after the pagers rang. Are we any closer to
02:20knowing how exactly this attack was organized, how it took place?
02:25Thank you for having me here tonight. Exactly how the attack took place it's a good question and it's
02:32still investigation, it's still ongoing. What is the most probable scenario
02:36tonight is that the pager that has been in use by Hezbollah for the last weeks
02:43and maybe a couple of months have been trapped during the delivery of the
02:49equipment themselves. They have been trapped by adding an explosive charge
02:53within the device and by changing also the software within this pager for
02:59it to explode when it receives a very specific message asking it to detonate.
03:05And there's also speculation that perhaps the explosions might have been
03:08caused by the device's batteries detonating after they heated up. Do you
03:13think that would be enough to cause these kind of blasts?
03:16It's another scenario that is possible but honestly from what we see on the
03:23pictures and there are numerous pictures, video, the force of the explosion does
03:28not look like an usual battery explosion. If you look at previous cases of
03:34battery issues that could be caused also by software at some point, usually the
03:40battery first is getting very warm and then it took fire and then you have the
03:46time to react, to throw away the device and so and also the impact of the
03:53explosion, the force of the explosion is much more than what I have seen before
03:57from with battery exploding. So do you think these pages then, they were only
04:03recently introduced for Hezbollah fighters, do you think that it's likely
04:07that they would have been intercepted before they got to the militants or that
04:13they were perhaps tampered with electronically from a distance?
04:18The combination of both. If we are talking about the explosion, the explosive charge
04:23in the device, it must have been added at some point. It could have been added
04:29during the production of the devices themselves in the factory but it's very
04:35risky because you don't know exactly what pager will go to what client and so
04:40there could be, you know, other explosions in the world at that time as
04:44we speak. Here we have only explosions of devices related to Hezbollah or very
04:51close to Hezbollah. So the most probable scenario is that somewhere, certainly an
04:58intelligence agency was aware of this order of pager, numerous pager and they
05:04were able to intercept after the production these pagers to open the box
05:09very precisely to change the battery or to add an explosive into the battery and
05:15then to change the software as well to load this remote activation
05:22and then to close everything back like usual, like normal, and send it to the
05:29destination, to the Hezbollah members. And that's a very tricky approach. It's
05:35something that we know for sure that the intelligence agencies have been doing
05:39before. If you remember the Snowden revelations a few years back, it shows
05:44us that the NSA was able and was practicing exactly this delivery trap
05:49approach. And sources also say it wouldn't be the first time that Israeli
05:54intelligence forces have placed explosives in personal phones to target
05:58their enemies but Hezbollah was trying to get around that by bringing in a more
06:01low-tech means of communication among fighters but it seems not to have worked
06:08if Israel is actually found to have been behind this attack as is suspected by
06:12Lebanon. For sure, they decided to switch from usual phone like we all have, the
06:19iPhone, the Android, and so on and so forth, mainly due to the fact that they
06:24knew that it could be spied on, you know, you could easily for an intelligence
06:30agency, you could easily go into the phone, listen to the communication, listen
06:35to the files, finding the location of the device. So they decided to go for a
06:39low-tech approach with this pager and as it is right now the case, it really shows
06:47that it might not have been the best decision to take and especially I think
06:51they did not think about this ability to track the devices themselves, otherwise
06:57they would have checked the devices. And to be sure, this trap must have been
07:02really expertly done because, you know, these devices at some point you will
07:07open them, you will change the battery and so on and so forth, so it must have
07:12been an expert work to be able not to be detected in fact.
07:16There's no response as of yet from Israel. Well, thank you so much, Jérôme, for
07:21joining us this evening. That's Jérôme Billoy, cyber security expert for the
07:25consultancy firm Wavestone. Let's move on to...

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