For two days this week, Hezbollah has been rocked by a series of small explosions across Lebanon, injuring thousands and killing at least 25. But these attacks haven’t come from rockets or drones. Instead, they’ve resulted from boobytrapped electronics—including pagers, walkie-talkies, and even, reportedly, solar equipment—detonating in coordinated waves. As …
Read More »First Israel’s Exploding Pagers Maimed and Killed. Now Comes the Paranoia
When Nadim Kobeissi was a child growing up in Beirut in the early 2000s, sonic booms created by the Israel Defense Forces' planes in the skies above Lebanon would occasionally rattle his home, generating enough noise and concussive force that he and his family would sometimes sleep in the hallways …
Read More »Walkie-Talkies Explode in New Attack on Hezbollah
With Hezbollah and Lebanon still reeling from a coordinated wave of pager explosions on Tuesday that killed at least 12 people and injured thousands, another bombardment began on Wednesday, this time taking the form of exploding two-way radios. Footage of the explosions, which was not independently confirmed by WIRED, appears …
Read More »The Mystery of Hezbollah’s Deadly Exploding Pagers
An unprecedented wave of small blasts erupted across Lebanon on Tuesday, killing at least 11 people and injuring nearly 2,800 after the wireless pagers of Hezbollah members began exploding, according to local officials. Pagers started exploding at around 3:30 pm local time, according to a statement from Hezbollah officials, who …
Read More »This Woman Secretly Tries to Stop War
Gabrielle Rifkind operates in the shadows, in the quiet, dark, back rooms of international politics. A bit paradoxically, the 71-ish Londoner strikes a sharp pose: outré pantsuits, dresses. Cool, kooky glasses. A white shock of bobbed hair. Upon meeting her, you really want to talk to her. Which is perhaps …
Read More »The Pentagon Is Planning a Drone ‘Hellscape’ to Defend Taiwan
It has become conventional wisdom among the halls of the United States government that China will launch a full-scale invasion of Taiwan within the next few years. And when that happens, the US military has a relatively straightforward response in mind: Unleash hell. Speaking to The Washington Post on the …
Read More »How Russia-Linked Malware Cut Heat to 600 Ukrainian Buildings in Deep Winter
As Russia has tested every form of attack on Ukraine's civilians over the past decade, both digital and physical, it's often used winter as one of its weapons—launching cyberattacks on electric utilities to trigger December blackouts and ruthlessly bombing heating infrastructure. Now it appears Russia-based hackers last January tried yet …
Read More »War Crime Prosecutions Enter a New Digital Age
In 2012, the al-Qaeda–linked jihadist group Ansar Eddine swept through Timbuktu, taking control of the Malian city. As part of the group’s imposition of sharia law over the residents, it created an Islamic police force, led by Al Hassan Ag Abdoul Aziz. Ansar Eddine controlled the city until 2013, when …
Read More »Activists Disrupt Amazon Conference Over $1.2 Billion Contract With Israel
A group of six activists disrupted the Amazon Web Services Summit in Washington, DC, on Wednesday to protest Project Nimbus, Amazon and Google’s $1.2 billion cloud computing contract with the Israeli government. The protest, which interrupted the keynote speech from Dave Levy, AWS worldwide public sector vice president, is the …
Read More »The Lords of Silicon Valley Are Thrilled to Present a ‘Handheld Iron Dome’
Drones have changed war. Small, cheap, and deadly robots buzz in the skies high above the world’s battlefields, taking pictures and dropping explosives. They’re hard to counter. ZeroMark, a defense startup based in the United States, thinks it has a solution. It wants to turn the rifles of frontline soldiers …
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