Amid the ongoing violent conflict with Israel, Hezbollah’s digital communications and activities are also under constant bombardment from Israeli hackers. In fact, this constant digital attack is said to have contributed to Hezbollah abandoning smartphone communication in favor of pagers and walkie-talkies. “Your phone is your agent,” said Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. saying in February, referring to Israel.
The commercial spyware industry has proven that it is possible to completely compromise a target’s smartphones by exploiting chains of vulnerabilities in their mobile operating systems. Developing spyware and constantly finding new vulnerabilities in operating systems as old ones are patched is a resource-intensive process, but it is still less complicated and risky than carrying out a hardware supply chain attack to physically compromise devices during or shortly after they are manufactured. And for an attacker, monitoring a target’s entire digital life on a smartphone or laptop is likely more valuable than the device’s potential as a bomb.
“I would venture to say that the only reason we don’t hear about laptops exploding is that they’re collecting too much information from them,” says Jake Williams, vice president of research and development at Hunter Strategy, who previously worked for the National Security Agency. “I think there’s also an element of targeting. You could fairly reliably expect pagers and personal radios to end up in the hands of Hezbollah operatives, but more general-purpose electronics like laptops would not.”
There are also more practical reasons why the attacks in Lebanon are unlikely to herald a global wave of consumer electronics explosions in the near future. Unlike the handheld devices originally designed in the 20th century, the current generation of laptops and, in particular, smartphones are packed with hardware components to offer the most features and longest battery life in the most efficient package possible.
Woodward, from the University of Surrey, who regularly disassembles consumer devices, points out that in modern smartphones there is very limited space to insert anything extra and that the manufacturing process can involve robots that precisely place the components on top of each other. X-rays show how Very tight Modern phones are.
“When you open up a smartphone, I think the only way to introduce a significant amount of explosive would be to do something like replace one of the components,” he says, such as modifying a battery to be half battery, half explosive. But “replacing a component in a smartphone would compromise its functionality,” he says, which could lead a user to investigate the malfunction.
In contrast, the pager model linked to the explosions, a “robust” device with 85 days of battery life-including Multiple replaceable partsAng Cui, founder of embedded device security firm Red Balloon Security, examined schematics of the pager model apparently used in the attacks and told WIRED that there would be free space inside to place explosives. The walkie-talkies that exploded, according to the manufacturer, were Discontinued a decade agoWoodward says that by opening up redesigned and current versions of older technologies, such as pagers, many internal electronics have been “compressed” as manufacturing methods and processor efficiency have improved.
