So far, the attacks that targeted Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah members through their pagers have had devastating consequences. At least nine people, including an eight-year-old girl, were killed, and around 2,800 were wounded. Over 150 of those injured are in critical condition, according to the Lebanese health minister.
It’s important to note that the exact cause of the explosions hasn’t been confirmed yet, and the news is developing by the minute. So far, experts who spoke to CNN said the explosions were most likely triggered by hardware tampering rather than another theory of a cybersecurity breach causing lithium batteries to heat up and explode – but neither has been confirmed by authorities.
In short, your communications device is not at risk for exploding unless it’s heavily tampered with and laced with explosives, experts who spoke to CNN said.
The explosions came as Israel and Hezbollah have engaged in tit-for-tat strikes for months in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war. The Israel Defense Forces had no comment on Tuesday, though Hezbollah and the Lebanese government blamed Israel.
Pagers are wireless devices that can send messages without an internet connection. Though they’ve lost popularity to cell phones, some fields like healthcare still depend on them.
Justin Cappos, a cybersecurity professor at NYU, said that it’s possible to cause damage to a variety of batteries – most commonly lithium batteries, which have caused dangerous fires. But he said it seems like the “devices were intentionally designed to explode when triggered, not a pager that everyone else in the world is using.”
“If you’re a normal person with a lithium-ion battery I would not be over-concerned about this,” Cappos said.
Baptiste Robert, a cybersecurity researcher and the CEO of Predicta Lab, said that rather than being hacked, the pagers were likely modified before shipping.
He said the scale of the explosion seems to show it’s a coordinated and sophisticated attack.
Michael Horowitz, head of intelligence at security and risk management consulting firm Le Beck International, also said the explosion was probably caused by modification of the devices rather than a cyber-attack.
“We’ve never seen this tactic being used at this scale, but this does mean that this isn’t an attack that could affect all pagers. If correct, this would suggest a very high penetration of Hezbollah’s supply chain for those devices,” Horowitz said over email.
When it comes to battery safety, the National Fire Protection Association has a set of safety guidelines for lithium batteries, such as properly disposing of them. The association also said people should stop using devices with lithium-ion batteries if the battery shows any sign of damage due to risk of fire or explosion.
Infamously, in 2016, Samsung issued a global recall of the Galaxy Note 7 in 2016, citing “battery cell issues” that caused the device to catch fire and at times explode. Even then, however, reports numbered in the dozens, not thousands, and not in a simultaneous event.
In 2016, about 500,000 hoverboards were recalled due to a risk of “catching fire and/or exploding,” according to the US Consumer Product Safety Commission.
It’s unclear what kind of battery the pagers in question had. A Lebanese security source told CNN that Hezbollah had recently purchased the devices.
CNN’s Christian Edwards, Adrienne Vogt and Aditi Sangal contributed to this report.
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