How the Israeli’s did it

From a correspondence with a friend who used to work at Bell Labs and Lucent:

Me:

You are the only person I know who  might be able to tell me how the Israelis could get 2,800 pagers to go off nearly simultaneously.  Any ideas?

Friend:

When you say the Israelis got the pagers to “go off,” I’m not sure whether you are referring to the fact that the pagers (a) received and responded to a signal, or (b) exploded. Your use of the phrase “nearly simultaneously” makes me suspect you mean (a), yet the only real mystery to me is (b): Smuggling a dangerous explosive into a manufactured product—a military-grade, supply-chain hack—is an extraordinary accomplishment. It makes you wonder what dangers we in the U.S. have exposed ourselves to by buying so many consumer products from a strategic foe, China. (As a small comfort for us, Russia builds almost nothing worth buying.)

Me:I meant (a) and completely agree with you on (b).

Any idea how they were able to signal so many?  Where would the transmitter be etc. etc. ?

Friend: Any system like that (pagers, whatever) has a broadcast capability. It’s likely that the units were hardware-hacked with an explosive + detonator and software-hacked so that the detonator was triggered by, I would guess, a particular (unlikely, nonsensical)  byte string in a received (broadcast) message. Then the Israelis hacked the “secure” Hezbollah pager network and issued the triggering broadcast message. All of that is part and parcel of standard spy stuff except for the (amazing!) hardware hack.

As I recall, Hamas did some network hacking on the Israelis to carry out their October 7 attack.