PSA: pagers are not secure. Messages are sent in effectively plain text and anybody can intercept them.
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PSA: pagers are not secure. Messages are sent in effectively plain text and anybody can intercept them.
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Graham Sutherland / Polynomialreplied to Kevin Beaumont last edited by
@GossiTheDog I spent a while sniffing POCSAG a few years ago and found out that the local police station and court used it to page duty solicitors, with case numbers, defendant names, and case details in many of the messages. also lots of hospital pager messages.
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Kevin Beaumontreplied to Kevin Beaumont last edited by
With regards to this story - the Beeb do a good job with it.
There's no credible indication it's some kind of cyber hack. More likely is the supply chain of the pager maker was sabotaged at some point.
Not in the article but recently, Hezbollah handed out pagers, telling people to swap from mobile phones. All eyes will be on where Hezbollah got said pagers.
"Unconfirmed CCTV footage showed blasts in shops" would suggest the distribution may have been quite wide.
Hezbollah blames Israel after deadly pager explosions in Lebanon
Nine people have been killed and 2,800 wounded by the blasts, the Lebanese health ministry says.
BBC News (www.bbc.co.uk)
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@GossiTheDog I think access to the communication would have been more valuable than the explosion of all devices.
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Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:replied to Martin Seeger last edited by
@masek @GossiTheDog I guess this is a clear indication they already had that for quite a while?
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Juliet Merida, Dum Tran Elf 🏳️⚧️replied to Graham Sutherland / Polynomial last edited by
@[email protected] @[email protected] Hospitals use pagers because they're, for some reason, generally considered "HIPAA Compliant." Just like analog fax machines.
But you want a smartphone app that lets you send messages containing PHI? You're gonna need eighteen levels of encryption, MDM, enforced device PINs, access audit logs...
It's mind bottling. -
@julie @gsuberland @GossiTheDog They use pagers because pagers are more reliable than cell phones.
I don’t think they send patient information with them, just short instructions for doctors to report somewhere, but I could be wrong.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Kevin Beaumont last edited by
@GossiTheDog Classic pagers are not secure. But conceivably, it's possible to custom-design pagers that can decrypt the inbound message for the user.
And if Mossad was able to specifically target a batch going Hezbollah's way, there's a strong possibility that it's a custom order batch.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Kevin Beaumont last edited by
@GossiTheDog Deutsche Welle has shown one of these videos; perhaps unfortunately, the point of the explosion is blurred out.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Juliet Merida last edited by
@julie Hospital pager systems are often very local, broadcast only through the building or the complex, not all over country like cellphone messages. This improves privacy of the data broadcast.
Another common quirk in hospital pager systems is, in many cases, they're deployed in a very archaic manner, only allowing a single number to be sent to the pager-holder, effectively just serving as an interrupt, without the context. This, too, improves privacy of the patients. (The original concept of pagers, way back when microprocessors were huge and bulky and power-hungry, was that one would send a phone number to the pager, prompting the pager-carrier to call that number. But hospitals tend to not do things that way; they may have special alert codes, and/or they may send around numbers of rooms where, say, a clean-up person is needed.)
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@MisuseCase This is not really inherent in pagers themselves, although one might quibble about the need of pager systems, especially hospital pager systems, often not being arranged into complex routable networks.
The reliability issue comes largely from hospitals being able to run their own pager systems. Hospitals are known to have various issues with radio propagation, up to building specialised wings for keeping x-rays in. The same sort of shielding often also interferes with microwave cellphone signals. But if the hospital runs their own signals, they can arrange to place extra broadcast stations so as to cover the areas of the buildings that might otherwise be 'shadowed' by the radiation shielding or even things as mundane as cellar walls.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Kevin Beaumont last edited by
@GossiTheDog Once upon a time, the concept of a ping of death was just a morbid joke, but technology has advanced by leaps and bounds since then.