Hezbollah is now in panic. But there is a risk of a new escalation of the war
The wave of explosions that hit Hezbollah’s facilities between September 17 and 18 represented a major operation by Israel to hit the Lebanese Shiite militants at home. Qualified sources who spoke to the international media agree on one fact: the hand behind this operation is that of the Tel Aviv secret services. And it has raised numerous questions about the actual manner in which the Mossad, of which in these columns we have remembered the tendency to targeted operations unpredictable for his enemies, he would have succeeded in striking.
Clemente: “Cyber matrix of the attack against Hezbollah? It is not obvious”
The explosion of pagers on September 17 and walkie-talkies and other devices on September 18 was initially blamed on the possible use of a centralized cyber weapon or sabotage of lithium-ion batteries. But Michael Clementcyber analyst, expert on the subject and CEO of Clio Security, invites us not to jump to hasty conclusions: “The attack’s totally cyber origin is not a given”, Clemente tells Affaritaliani.it. The expert invites us to “think about materially analysable data” and starts by clarifying the first of the two episodes: “From what we can analyze, assuming that we are in the realm of hypotheses, we note that in the case of pagers the presence of lithium batteries is to be excluded”, Clemente underlines.
People pagers do not have lithium batteries
“Once we identified the model,” Clemente notes, “my colleagues and I looked at the instruction manual and saw that, in the case of the pager models in question” of Taiwanese origin, “it talks about charging via a triple A battery, so the scenario that sees a cyber attack as the detonator of the battery explosion seems absurd. First, because there were no lithium batteries; second, because lithium batteries make a “flame” and not a sudden detonation.
The hypothesis of devices infected by explosives being manufactured
Clemente continues: “From the videos of the explosions you can’t see any flame, but what seems to be the effect of the detonation of a high-powered military explosive. I make another consideration: who would take the risk of an operation like that with the possibility of having to make sure that the batteries were charged in thousands of devices to blow them up at the same time?”. A question that remains open and unanswered. “Even more so,” continues the expert, “this applies to batteries,” and It is more likely that “the internal device that blew up the devices must have been infected with explosives” during manufacturing. This hypothesis is gaining traction as the Times of Israel reports that Hezbollah ordered the new batches of pagers and walkie-talkies at the same time to increase the level of security of communications.
Is the company that produces the devices subject to Mossad influence?
Clemente adds: “How the explosives got into the devices is not known for certain, but it is possible that the company producing the devices was reachable or influenced by the Mossad.”. In this context, the only trace of “a cyber operation” according to Clemente “could be in the field of command to activate the explosions in the infected devices. But there is the alternative that it was a timer with a countdown. And nothing prevents us from thinking that the Israelis used a device like a nanosim to send the order to explode to the infected devices.”. The mystery remains, but one thing is certain: the operation has thrown Hezbollah into panic but risks destabilizing the region if it fuels a new escalation of a war that has been going on in Gaza, mercilessly, for almost a year.
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