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How Israel Built a Modern-Day Trojan Horse: Exploding Pagers (www.nytimes.com)

submitted 5 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The Israeli government did not tamper with the Hezbollah devices that exploded, defense and intelligence officials say. It manufactured them as part of an elaborate ruse.

In Lebanon, as Israel picked off senior Hezbollah commandos with targeted assassinations, their leader came to a conclusion: If Israel was going high-tech, Hezbollah would go low. It was clear, a distressed Hezbollah chief, Hassan Nasrallah, said, that Israel was using cellphone networks to pinpoint the locations of his operatives.

. . .

Israeli intelligence officials saw an opportunity.

Even before Mr. Nasrallah decided to expand pager usage, Israel had put into motion a plan to establish a shell company that would pose as an international pager producer.

By all appearances, B.A.C. Consulting was a Hungary-based company that was under contract to produce the devices on behalf of a Taiwanese company, Gold Apollo. In fact, it was part of an Israeli front, according to three intelligence officers briefed on the operation. They said at least two other shell companies were created as well to mask the real identities of the people creating the pagers: Israeli intelligence officers.

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[-] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

I don't think you understand. The whole point of the network they built was for security. If just anyone can send a message, that would be a huge security vulnerability.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I must admit I thought pagers used the gsm (cellular) network, but could only receive messages and therefore couldn't be triangulated / located like a mobile phone.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pager#Security

Reading deeper, if it's radio signals then I can't imagine Israel would have any problems replicating or spoofing them.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Got news for you, pretty much all wireless communication is via radio 😀

Yes, it sounds like Hezbollah built their own personal network. Yet another benefit of pagers, it's far less expensive to communicate when you're talking about just a few bytes of data.

this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024

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