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The Mystery of Hezbollah’s Deadly Exploding Pagers

At least eight people have been killed and more than 2,700 people have been injured in Lebanon by exploding pagers. Experts say the blasts point towards a supply chain compromise, not a cyberattack.

“Those explosions aren’t just batteries,” says Jake Williams, vice president of research and development at Hunter Strategy who formerly worked for the US National Security Agency. “It's unlikely that hacking was involved, as it's likely that explosive material had to be inside the pagers to cause such an effect,” says Lukasz Olejnik, an independent consultant and visiting senior research fellow at King’s College London’s Department of War Studies. Michael Horowitz, head of intelligence at Middle East and North Africa risk management company Le Beck International, says if the attack is supply-chain-based, then it could have taken years to prepare and involved infiltrating a supplier and placing explosives inside new pagers.

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