Hezbollah wrongly thought its low-tech pagers were safe

Electronic pagers across Lebanon exploded simultaneously on September 17, 2024, killing 12 and wounding more than 2,700. The following day, another wave of explosions in the country came from detonating walkie-talkies. The attacks appeared to target members of the militant group Hezbollah.

The pagers attack involved explosives planted in the communications devices by Israeli operatives, according to US officials cited by The New York Times. Hezbollah had recently ordered a shipment of pagers, according to the report.

Secretly attacking the supply chain is not a new technique in intelligence and military operations. For example, the US National Security Agency intercepted computer hardware bound for overseas customers, inserted malware or other surveillance tools and then repackaged them for delivery to certain foreign buyers, a 2010 NSA internal document showed.

This differs from accessing a specific person’s device, such as when Israel’s Shin Bet secretly inserted explosives into a cellphone to remotely kill a Hamas bombmaker in 1996.

Hezbollah, a longtime adversary of Israel, had increased its use of pagers in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. By shifting to relatively low-tech communication devices, including pagers and walkie-talkies, Hezbollah apparently sought an advantage against Israel’s well-known sophistication in tracking targets through their phones.

Cellphones: The ultimate tracker

As a former cybersecurity professional and current security researcher, I view cellular devices as the ultimate tracking tool for both government and commercial entities – in addition to users, criminals and the mobile phone provider itself. As a result, mobile phone tracking has contributed to the fight