At least nine people are dead and around 2,800 injured in Lebanon in an attack targeting the pagers of Hezbollah members, the Lebanese health minister said.
quite aside from the question of how you hack thousands of pagers to make them explode, what are we carrying around in our daily lives that are one internet command away from blowing up?
Not much. The hard part is developing the trigger mechanism. After that, you just need a guy doing assembly to add the extra part. Or you stop the truck when it leaves the factory and delay it a day while you install the parts.
A video I looked at of a 18650 lithium battery cell exploding -- if it was the battery, and not sabotaged pagers being injected into Hezbollah's supplies before they were distributed -- was not a very large explosion.
If it's the battery, I think it'd have to be really close to you, probably on you, to likely hurt you. Like, not just a random device nearby.
Those 20+ million better trust the hardware and software engineers on that to have their security stuff together, because one of those going off probably isn't gonna be much fun.
Maybe gamepad controller lithium batteries too. I don't know if those have large enough batteries to be an issue, but they sit right next to your fingers and can get firmware updates and have a battery.