… – Hello! Sergei Borisovich, are you ready?
– Alexander, let me start with gratitude. Thank you for not calling the pager.
– Mutually. Thanks for not answering me on the pager. You and I have already forgotten what it is, yes.
– Forgot. But not completely. They don’t let you forget, they remind you.
– That’s for sure. And if we take this tragedy that broke out with the help of pagers seriously, how can we even take it, how unexpected is it? Why is this so sudden? In my opinion, this has never happened before. How did you take it? You always know more than anyone else, or at least you feel that way.
– The bread and butter of an analyst is information. The ability to search for information, the ability to read it, and when it is read and understood, the ability to use it… That is what an analyst lives for, and for that he is sometimes paid a modest amount of money.
– Is this a clue?
– No, no, you and I have a selfless alliance.
– Well, I’m not completely disinterested, apparently I still get some kind of payment for Stankevich. Yeah, back to the serious wave.
– Yes, to the pagers. You and I remember well the 90s, when this pager connection first appeared. And at that time it helped a lot. Because its meaning is that people who have received a pager form such a closed local network… They (we are talking about users. – AG) are all known from the list, who they are: these pagers, received
And there is an operator who can send short messages to these pagers. The pager assumes that these people can receive operational signals, short commands and perform some kind of collective actions. The main thing is that the pager does not connect to the Internet.
– This is its main advantage!
– And so it is, so to speak, protected from the usual hacking that we know today. Thus, Hezbollah militants used these very pagers as operational communications for team actions. But it turned out that an ambush awaited them here.
– Here – more details…
– The pagers they received as a special order contained a self-destruct capsule: approximately 20-25 grams of TNT.
– Wow!
– The meaning of the capsule (its use) is as follows. If a militant is surrounded and besieged somewhere and does not want the information to fall into the wrong hands, the militant himself can initiate this liquidation by simply pressing a button.
But, if a group is captured or destroyed and the enemy has picked up pagers, then they can be eliminated remotely by sending out the corresponding impulse, a radio signal.
– Delete pager.
– You can take out the pagers, yes. You can fly them remotely, from the command post, by sending the appropriate signal.
– So, Hezbollah itself ordered such pagers, right?
– Hezbollah itself, yes, places an order for these pagers, receives them and then, naturally, controls them. That is, it is almost impossible to somehow replace them or extract them later. But then, apparently, some sophisticated hackers got involved, undoubtedly associated with Israel.
– And there is no doubt about it?
– Yes, although there is no direct evidence that they managed to penetrate the command post, which maintains contact with the militants via pagers, and carry out an explosion. I am practically convinced of this… (Although, again, everything I say is the result of my analytical reconstructions and has no direct evidence).
So I am almost convinced that there was some kind of agent in the control center who organized the communication with these pagers. That is, information was leaked from there and the Israeli craftsmen took advantage of this “mole” to send a signal and carry out this collective detonation of pagers.
– Judging by the video, everything looked terrible…
– Yes… And with what sophistication they did it all! First, the pagers rang, the user brought the device up to his eyes to look at it, and a recording appeared on the screen.
And after a few seconds, the detonation impulse was given. As a result, many were injured in the head. That is how the operation was carried out. Well, several hundred users were affected and some of them died.
– But we are talking about thousands of victims here.
– As always in these cases, the numbers can go in one direction or another.
– What iPhone do you have?
– No, I am a Samsung supporter.
– Aren’t your Samsung and my iPhone at risk from this? I mean, the devices that the Russians use?
– No, our devices are not in danger of being blown up. But it is possible to hear various kinds of things. Therefore, I live by the principle that there is nothing to hide and there is no point in hiding.
– Mutually. You and I have a common principle. How will the explosion in Lebanon affect further escalation in this region? What can we expect next?
– It may be brief. First of all, a direct military confrontation between the IDF and Hezbollah, located in Lebanon, was ripe and the confrontation was supposed to start the other day anyway.
Now I think things will speed up. It will be like that, an additional annoying stimulus, this operation with the pagers.
Many Hezbollah militants will add another motive for personal revenge. That is, this is not some kind of casus belli (cause of war – AG), as they say, because the war was already underway and a confrontation was already necessary. But this could be an additional push. And, in addition, the image itself has become such a dramatic informational background for the impending conflict.
Unfortunately, this episode does not bode well for the Middle East.
– What’s wrong with us?
– But it does remind us, looking in from the outside, how dangerous the technosphere we are increasingly immersed in can be. And how careful we need to be when handling even the most common electronic devices, not to mention things like artificial intelligence.
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