Pagers explode in Lebanon, can your phone also be turned into a bomb by hackers?

In a bizarre and deadly incident that took place in Lebanon, hundreds of pagers that were allegedly used by the militant group Hezbollah detonated simultaneously across the country on September 18. The explosions resulted in the deaths of at least nine people and left over 3,000 injured. There is video footage from one location that shows a man shopping at a grocery store when the pager at his waist suddenly detonated, throwing him to the ground as bystanders fled in terror. The incident has sparked speculation regarding the cause of the explosions. Initial theories pointed towards battery overheating, which has further raised an unsettling question: could such an incident occur with smartphones?
Given the ubiquity of smartphones and their reliance on lithium-ion batteries, the possibility of a similar attack using these devices cannot be dismissed, though certain factors make such an event both difficult and different.

Hezbollah’s adoption of pagers, deemed more secure than smartphones, was primarily driven by concerns over surveillance from Israeli intelligence. Pagers, with their simple hardware, are harder to track and less vulnerable to digital hacking compared to smartphones. However, the same core technology — lithium-ion batteries — powers both pagers and smartphones, and this technology carries inherent risks.

Lithium-ion batteries, widely used due to their high energy density and rechargeability, are not immune to failures. Factors such as excessive heat, overcharging, or physical damage can cause these batteries to overheat and, in rare cases, explode. Manufacturing defects and design flaws also contribute to the risk. For instance, smartphone explosions, while uncommon, are usually due to overheating from prolonged use, external damage, or faulty components. These incidents, often isolated, are more of a manufacturing or usage issue than a coordinated attack.

However, the Hezbollah pager explosions suggest a more sophisticated scenario, potentially involving tampered devices embedded with explosive materials during manufacturing. According to an NYT report, Israel hid explosives inside a batch of pagers ordered from Taiwanese manufacturer Gold Apollo, although Gold Apollo has refuted the media reports. A switch was reportedly embedded to detonate them remotely. If a similar tactic were applied to smartphones, it would require meticulous interference in the supply chain or a method to remotely trigger the explosions, possibly via a coordinated radio signal or an electronic pulse.

In theory, the concept could be applied to smartphones. Smartphones, due to their complex software and network connections, might even present more opportunities for remote manipulation, especially if a vulnerability in the device’s firmware could be exploited. However, executing such an attack on a mass scale would be significantly more challenging due to the widespread and varied nature of smartphone brands, models, and software systems. The diverse security protocols of modern smartphones add another layer of protection that is harder to breach en masse.
On their own, the phones don’t explode. Even if they are manipulated by hackers to increase battery heat by modifying the current flowing into them, they are not going to explode en masse. There could be one or two isolated incidents. This is because the phones have a circuitry that kicks in with safety measures whenever there is oversupply of heat. For instance, in an iPhone, even in the Delhi heat, if the phone starts to heat up, the charging is automatically cut off.
In addition to that, smartphones nowadays use sophisticated cooling chambers that ensure any built up heat in the device is dissipated. Modern smartphones often use vapour chambers and graphite cooling systems that spread heat evenly across the device, using liquid that evaporates and condenses to dissipate heat, while graphite layers help in conducting heat away from critical components like the processor.
That said, even in a scenario where a smartphone is manipulated to heat, the chances are that in most instances, instead of exploding, the phones will somewhat melt, causing battery swelling or leakage, but they rarely ever explode. Even in instances where we read about someone’s phone exploding, you would see it may catch a small fire in an extreme scenario, but it does not explode.
Pagers, once a ubiquitous tool in the 1990s before the rise of mobile phones, are basic devices that receive short messages via radio frequencies. Though largely outdated, their hardware is still used by groups seeking a low-tech alternative to smartphones. The peculiar use of pagers by Hezbollah is driven by the group’s prioritisation of security and anonymity. Unlike modern smartphones, pagers operate with simpler technology, making them harder to track.
The incident comes at a time of heightened tensions in the region. Hezbollah and Israel have been trading fire across the Lebanon-Israel border, exacerbated by the ongoing war in Gaza.