Article title updated
Iran's Ambassador to Lebanon Loses One Eye, Seriously Damages Other in Pager Explosion, New York Times
Mojtaba Amani, according to the publication, is being evacuated to Iran for treatment. It is noted that before the explosion, the pagers emitted a beep, which prompted many to bring the devices to their faces.
The attack was probably carried out by Israeli intelligence services, which planted explosives in about 5,000 pagers, Reuters reports. Of these, about 3,000 exploded. A senior source in Lebanon told the agency that the devices were planted by the Israeli spy service "at the production level." "The Mossad inserted a circuit board containing explosive material into the device, which receives a code. It is very difficult to detect by any means. Even with any device or scanner," the source said.
The day before, 4,000 people were injured in Lebanon, 11 of whom were killed as a result of pager explosions. Reuters writes that hundreds of members of the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, including fighters and medics, were seriously injured due to explosions of pagers, which they use for secret communication.
A second wave of explosions today
I'm kind of guessing, from the strength of the explosion in the video -- it really was a small explosion, not bursting into flames -- that somehow rigged pagers were inserted into Hezbollah's equipment prior to distribution to operatives.
But if this was, instead, some kind of remote software compromise of battery management system firmware for lithium batteries, now I have one more thing to worry about in my life, with all the devices with lithium batteries I have.
looks warily at laptop on my chest
EDIT: Strengthening my concerns, in the CNN article I linked to in my other comment, the devices were termed "hacked" by Lebanese internal security forces. Now, okay, that's a report immediately after the event, and I don't know how much time they have had to actually do analysis. Or if they're right. But:
...it sure doesn't assuage my concerns at all. Even if you couldn't make a BMS discharge lithium batteries hard enough to explode, you definitely can make them do so hard enough to make a pretty unpleasant fire. You do that with numerous laptop-sized devices all over a country, that'd potentially be a pretty unpleasant event.
sighs
Maybe it's possible to mandate that lithium-ion devices conforming to some sort of safety certification standard, like UL or something, have non-updatable-firmware hardware putting a physical limit on discharge rate. I don't think that that'd add too much cost or too many restrictions to devices.
EDIT2: From this YouTube video, it sounds like as long as you're not using sketchy battery cells in the device you're building, that battery manufacturers already take this into consideration via a blowout hole:
All that being said, I wouldn't be surprised if I have some devices with sketchy cells...but my guess is that at least in my collection, when it comes to large-battery-capacity, Internet-connected devices capable of firmware updates, stuff like laptops, they're probably -- hopefully -- using legit battery cells.
I don't believe small lithium batteries can explode like that. Not even big car batteries explode like that. They make a big fire but not this kind of explosion.
Either explosives were implanted somehow by IDF in the supply chain, or Hezbollah is crazy enough to put explosives there, just in case the devices fall in enemy hands, and IDF learned that and trigger the explosions remotely.
The scary thing about a supply chain attack is that Hezbollah aren't idiots. This is basically like buying a "burner phone" (that name will now have different connotations now).
In the movies, people buying burner phones go to a random corner store and buy a random phone off the shelf. That way, even if they're under surveillance, the cops / CIA / FBI can't pre-bug the phone because they don't know which corner store the person's going to go to, let alone which phone they'll pick off the shelf.
If you're an armed group in Israel's crosshairs, you're going to take similar precautions when buying thousands of pagers. The safe way to do it would be to slowly and unpredictably get a small sample of ones that are being sold to the general public. If this is true, it could mean that there are tens of thousands of pagers out there that contain explosives that were merely sold as "decoys" in order to try to make Hezbollah feel safe in buying them. In other words, there may be tens of thousands of explosives in pagers that weren't activated because they weren't in the hands of Hezbollah when Israel decided to hit the button.