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台灣科技公司上了世界頭版頭條 - Mithil Aggarwal等
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Who made the exploding pagers? A messy global trail emerges behind deadly Lebanon blasts
Taiwan-based Gold Apollo (金阿波羅股份有限公司) said Hungary-based BAC was licensed to use its brand, as the militant group Hezbollah said there would be a “severe reckoning” over the blasts.
Mithil Aggarwal and Peter Guo and Dan De Luce and Andrea Mitchell and Ian Sherwood and Carlo Angerer, 09/19/24
HONG KONG — An electronics manufacturer in Taiwan said Wednesday that a company based in Hungary made the pagers bearing its brand that were used by members of the militant group Hezbollah and exploded simultaneously across Lebanon on Tuesday.
At least 12 people were killed and more than 2,750 others were injured in the blasts, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry. In a statement Wednesday, the Iran-backed Hezbollah said there would be a “severe reckoning” over the blasts, blaming Israel.
Israel has not commented directly on the explosions, but two U.S. officials and a senior diplomat in the Middle East told NBC News that Israel was behind the attack.
Images circulating online show destroyed pagers in Lebanon whose features are consistent with those made by Taiwan-based Gold Apollo. The company’s founder and president, Hsu Ching-kuang, told reporters Wednesday that the pagers were made by another company licensed to use its brand.
“There is an agent in Europe whom we have cooperated with for three years, they are the agent for all of our products,” Hsu said at the company’s offices in the northern Taiwanese city of New Taipei.“We are not a big company, but we are a responsible company that cares about our products,” he said.
In a statement, Gold Apollo identified the other company as the Hungary-based BAC Consulting. The company is authorized to use Gold Apollo’s logo for product sales in certain regions, “but the design and manufacturing of the products are entirely handled by BAC,” the statement said.
Reached by phone Wednesday, BAC Consulting Chief Executive Cristiana Bársony-Arcidiacono confirmed that her company worked with Gold Apollo. But when asked about the pagers and the explosions, she said, “I don’t make the pagers. I am just the intermediate. I think you got it wrong.”
Records on the Hungarian Ministry of Justice show that a firm with the name BAC Consulting was registered as a new company on May 21, 2022. Its main activities listed retail trade of telecommunications products, as well as management consulting, jewellery making and cultivation of fruit.
A record from May 2, 2020 suggests that a company of the same name had existed in the past and was shut down in 2020.
Zoltan Kovacs, a spokesperson for the Hungarian prime minister said on X that authorities have confirmed that BAC Consulting was a trading intermediary that was not manufacturing or operating in Hungary, and that "the referenced devices have never been in Hungary."
He emphasized that, "this case poses no national security risk" to the country.
A spokesperson for Gold Apollo declined to comment further Wednesday, citing the ongoing investigation.
Taiwan’s Economic Affairs Ministry said Wednesday that Gold Apollo had exported 260,000 pagers from 2022 to August 2024, primarily to European and American markets. In a statement, it said there had been no reports of explosions related to those products and that there were no records of the company exporting pagers directly to Lebanon.“Was this batch of goods actually modified? ... Did another manufacturer produce them and simply label them with the Apollo brand? This part is still under investigation by the authorities,” a ministry spokesperson told NBC News.
The explosions Tuesday come amid rising concern that tensions between Israel and Lebanon could spiral into all-out war. Israel and Hezbollah, which is based in Lebanon and opposes Israel’s military assault on the Gaza Strip, have been engaged in cross-border attacks since the start of the Israel-Hamas war last October, displacing thousands of people in both countries.
The Lebanese Foreign Ministry condemned what it called an “Israeli cyber attack,” saying that it would lodge a complaint with the United Nations Security Council.
Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, the U.N. special coordinator for Lebanon, said Tuesday that the explosions marked “an extremely concerning escalation in what is an already unacceptably volatile context.”
State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said Tuesday that the U.S. was “not aware of this incident in advance” and not involved in it.
However, two U.S. officials told NBC News that Israel was behind the attack, while a senior diplomat in the Middle East commented “this is undoubtedly an Israeli operation” when asked about the pager attack. The United States and other Western governments are still gathering information about the attack and how it was carried out, two U.S. officials and a Western official said.
It was unclear why Israel carried out the attack when it did and whether it was an opportunistic operation or something more strategic that would be followed by other actions, the officials said.
The officials did not confirm reports about how the devices were possibly tampered with and designed to detonate.
Videos suggest that explosive devices were integrated into the pagers, said N.R. Jenzen-Jones, director of Armament Research Services, a technical intelligence consulting firm.“The scale suggests a complex supply-chain attack, rather than a scenario in which devices were intercepted and modified in transit,” he said on X.
Pagers are favored by members of Hezbollah who avoid using cellphones for fear that Israel could use them to track and monitor them. Lebanese officials warned the public Tuesday to stay away from their wireless communication devices pending further notice.
Hezbollah said it was investigating the explosions and that there would be a “severe reckoning that the criminal enemy must face for the massacre it committed on Tuesday against our people, our families and our fighters in Lebanon.”
The group said earlier that “a girl and two brothers” were among those killed by the explosions, some of which appeared to have been captured on closed-circuit TV video and shared on social media. Muhammad Mahdi, the son of Ali Ammar, a Hezbollah member of Parliament, was also reportedly killed.
Hsu of Gold Apollo said he also felt he had been victimized and was considering filing a lawsuit.
“I am a businessman,” he said. “How did I get involved in this attack?”
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摩薩德爆炸暗殺簡史 - Harriet Marsden
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不得不佩服摩薩德人員的科技水平和運作功力。
Mossad's history with explosive technology
Infamous Israeli spy agency has not claimed responsibility for Hezbollah's exploding pagers but has 'decades-long' list of remote assassinations
Harriet Marsden, The Week UK, 09/19/24
Israel's intelligence agency Mossad is reportedly behind the operation that caused thousands of Hezbollah's pagers to detonate across Lebanon.
Israel has not claimed responsibility for the "unprecedented" security breach among Lebanon's armed militant group. It killed at least 12 people and injured more than 3,000, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry – "including many of the group's fighters and Iran's envoy to Beirut". But two senior sources told Reuters that it was the work of Mossad.
Hezbollah, the powerful Iranian-backed group, has vowed revenge against Iran's long-time foe Israel, whom it holds "fully responsible" for the pager attacks. American and other officials briefed on the operation have also pointed the finger at Israel, said The New York Times. After nearly a year of escalating tit-for-tat strikes between Israel and Hezbollah, "most people" in Lebanon assume that the exploding pagers are Mossad's work, said The Times. If so, it would "simply be the most striking example yet" of the intelligence agency's methods.
How far back does this go?
Mossad has a "decades-long" history of using telephones and explosives to track and assassinate targets abroad, said the Financial Times.
But the practice exploded into the world's consciousness in 1972, after the Palestinian group Black September took 11 Israeli athletes hostage during the Olympics in Munich. All the hostages were killed – nine died in a botched rescue attempt, along with five of the eight terrorists – in what became known as the Munich massacre.
In revenge, Israel launched Operation Wrath of God, a covert years-long campaign of car bombs and booby-trapped packages to kill members of the militant group and of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Most famously, Mossad operatives "swapped out the marble base" of the phone used by Mahmoud Hamshari, the PLO representative in Paris, for a replica "packed" with explosives. When he answered the phone, "a nearby Israeli team remotely detonated the explosives", killing Hamshari. The operation became "part of Israeli spy legend".
Have there been other notable operations?
Too many to count, said Foreign Policy. But Mossad's early rudimentary operations quickly developed into more sophisticated methods combined with advanced surveillance and cyber capabilities.
In 1979, the assassination of PLO leader Ali Hassan Salameh with a car bomb in Beirut showcased the group's growing confidence with explosives.
Most prominently, in 1996 Israel's internal security agency managed to trick Hamas's chief bomb maker into answering a phone call from his father. The phone had been brought into Gaza by a collaborator, and Yahya Ayyash was killed when the hidden explosives were detonated. The "sophisticated" assassination of a man known as "the Engineer" "deprived Hamas of a key and uniquely talented asset".
What about the Iranian scientists?
In the past two decades, Mossad's primary focus has been Iran – in particular, its shadowy nuclear and missile programmes.
In 2004, Israel's government ordered Mossad to "prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons", said The New York Times. Over the next few years, the agency carried out "a campaign of sabotage and cyberattacks" on Iran's nuclear facilities, and continued "methodically picking off the experts" leading the weapons programme. Its agents assassinated "five nuclear scientists and wounded another".
The notorious culmination came in 2020, when Iran's chief nuclear weapons scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was shot dead by a remotely controlled machine gun. Iran blamed Israel, but Tehran's "far-fetched" explanation for what happened – a "killer robot" – was "widely mocked" and assumed to be a cover-up for its own failures.
It was a "straight-out-of-science-fiction story", said the NYT. But this time, "there really was a killer robot".
How does the pager operation differ?
Even the "futuristic" assassination of Fakhrizadeh required "human hands on the ground" to get the gun into the country and into position, said The Times.
We don't yet know why the pagers exploded – whether packed with explosive substances or altered in some way – but the execution must have been more "hands off" to remotely detonate up to a thousand devices at the same time.
The 1996 assassination of Ayyash, one of Israel's "more celebrated operations", still relied on an informant to plant the booby-trapped device, said The Spectator. "The complexity, scale and scope of the pager-bombs make the Ayyash hit look like child's play."
The militant group had only turned to pagers to avoid Israeli surveillance of smartphones. But in the same way that "killing Ayyash didn't stop Hamas", the "pager bombs won't stop Hezbollah", said the magazine.
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呼叫器爆炸案後面的奇女子 -- Krisztina Than
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這種類型的人物，如果不是小說中的虛構角色，就是現實生活中的間諜或特工。
On the trail of the mystery woman whose company licensed exploding pagers
Krisztina Than, 09/21/24
Summary
* Budapest-based BAC Consulting licensed pagers from Taiwan manufacturer
* CEO Barsony-Arcidiacono says she did not make the pagers: 'I am just the intermediate'
* PhD in physics but never pursued career in science
* A string of short term assignments but no enduring job
BUDAPEST (Reuters) -She speaks seven languages, has a PhD in particle physics, an apartment in Budapest plastered with her own pastel drawings of nudes, and a career that took her around Africa and Europe doing humanitarian work.
What Cristiana Barsony-Arcidiacono, 49, the Italian-Hungarian CEO and owner of Hungary-based BAC Consulting, says she hasn't done is make the exploding pagers that killed 12 people and wounded more than 2,000 in Lebanon this week.
After her company was revealed to have licensed the design for the pagers from their original Taiwanese manufacturer Gold Apollo, Barsony-Arcidiacono told NBC News that she didn't make them.
"I am just the intermediate. I think you got it wrong," she said.
Since then, she has not appeared in public. Neighbours say they haven't seen her. Barsony-Arcidiacono has not responded to Reuters calls and emails and there was no answer when Reuters visited her private address in downtown Budapest. Her flat in a stately old Budapest building, where a door to a vestibule had been open earlier in the week, has been shuttered.
Following publication of this story, Reuters again reached out to her but received no reply. The Hungarian government said on Wednesday that BAC Consulting was a “trading-intermediary company” which had no manufacturing site in the country and that the pagers had never been to Hungary.
Discussions with acquaintances and former work colleagues paint a picture of a woman with an impressive intellect with a peripatetic career in a string of short-term jobs in which she never quite settled down.
An acquaintance of hers, who like others who knew her socially in Budapest asked not to be identified, called her "Good-willed, not a business type". The person said she appeared to be someone who is always enthusiastic to try something new and readily believed things.
Kilian Kleinschmidt, a veteran ex-U.N. humanitarian administrator who hired Barsony-Arcidiacono in 2019 to run a six-month Dutch-funded programme to train Libyans in Tunisia in subjects such as hydroponics, IT and business development, described hiring her as a big "mistake". After disagreements in how she managed staff, he said he let her go before her contract was over, which Reuters could not independently verify.
At her Budapest home, a steel outer gate encloses a small vestibule where life drawings of nudes sketched in red and orange pastels can be seen taped up on the wall. An inner door leading into her apartment was ajar when Reuters first visited the building on Wednesday, and closed when the reporter returned on Thursday. No one answered the bell.
A woman living in the building for the past two years said Barsony-Arcidiacono was already a resident when she moved in, and described her as kind, not loud, but communicative.
She practiced her drawing as part of a Budapest art club, though she hadn't attended for a couple of years, said the organiser of the group, who said she seemed like more of a businesswoman than an artist but was upbeat and outgoing.
A school mate of Barsony-Arcidiacono said she grew up in a family with a working father and housewife mother in Santa Venerina, near Catania in eastern Sicily, and attended high school nearby. He described her as a quite reserved youngster.
In the early 2000s she earned her PhD in physics at University College London, where her dissertation on positrons - a subatomic particle with the mass of an electron and a positive charge - remains available on the UCL website. But she appears to have left without pursuing a scientific career.
"As far as I know she has not done scientific work since then," Akos Torok, a retired physicist who was one of her professors at UCL and published papers with her at the time, told Reuters by email.
A resume she used to get the job working for Kleinschmidt included references to other post-graduate degrees, in politics and development, from the London School of Economics and the School of Oriental and African Studies, which Reuters was not able to verify.
She then went on to describe a string of jobs working on NGO projects in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
In a separate CV on the BAC Consulting website, she described herself as a "Board Member at the Earth Child Institute", an educational and environmental charity in New York. The group's founder, Donna Goodman, told Reuters Barsony-Arcidiacono had never held any role there.
"She was a friend of a friend of a board member, and contacted us about a job opening" in 2018, Goodman said. "But she was never invited to apply."
That CV also described her as a former "Project Manager" at the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2008-2009, who organised a nuclear research conference. The IAEA said its records indicated she had been an intern there for eight months.
On BAC Consulting's website, which was taken down by the end of this week, the company gave little idea of its actual business in Hungary. Its registered address is a serviced office in a Budapest suburb.
"I am a scientist using my very diverse background to work on interdisciplinary projects for strategic decision-making(water & climate policy, investments)," Barsony-Arcidiacono wrote on her CV.
"With excellent analytical, language, and interpersonal skills, I enjoy working and leading in a multicultural environment where diversity, integrity, and humour are valued."
(Reporting by Krisztina Than in BudapestAdditional reporting by Francois Murphy in Vienna, Catarina Demony in London, Giselda Vagnoni in Rome, Johan Ahlander in Stockholm, David Guathier-Villars in Istanbul, Laila Bassam in Beirut, Nerijus Adomaitis in Oslo, James Pearson in London, and Marine Strauss in BrusselsWriting by Niklas PollardEditing by James Pearson and Peter Graff)
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通訊器材之前有駭客後有炸藥–R. Oliphant/M. Field
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採購這批器材的人倒霉了；想來當初簽約時，回扣沒有少拿，上頭也沒少打點。
只是冤冤相報何時了？
The terrible blunder that exposed Hezbollah’s fighters to audacious pager attack
Terror group thought switching to old-fashioned devices would keep it safe – but they appear to have been rigged with explosives
Roland Oliphant Senior Foreign Correspondent. Matthew Field, 09/17/24
Hezbollah’s pagers were meant to be safety measures, secure from Israeli eavesdropping. Instead, they were a deadly Trojan horse.
After suffering a series of assassinations of top operatives during months of low-level war with Israel, this summer Hezbollah ordered its fighters to ditch their mobile phones. They were too easy to track and too readily compromised by Israel’s fearsome military hackers.
“If you’re looking for an Israeli agent, look at the phone in your hand,” Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s chief, warned his men.
Instead, communications would be confined to more old-fashioned means: couriers delivering messages by word of mouth.
Telecoms would be limited to 1980s-style pagers, with none of the vulnerabilities of smartphones, Hezbollah sources told Reuters in July.
Thousands of the latest and most secure models were duly procured and distributed to top fighters, officials and allies.
On Tuesday afternoon, that was revealed as a terrible blunder.
At 3.45 pm local time, thousands of pagers in thousands of pockets simultaneously exploded.
By early evening, at least nine people had been confirmed killed and a staggering 2,750 injured.
The wounded reportedly included civilians as well as Hezbollah fighters although the reports could not immediately be verified. Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon was also seen being taken to hospital.
In one greengrocer’s store, a middle-aged man had reached the grape counter when a puff of smoke leapt from his midriff.
He fell, screaming to the floor, badly wounded by the explosion from his pocket, bag or belt. The young man serving him leapt instinctively away.
The nearest bystander, after understandably making sure he himself was unhurt, simply stood over the screaming man, as he writhed on the floor, at a loss as to what to do.
They were not alone in being non-plussed.
Ahmad Ayoud, a butcher from the Basta neighbourhood in Beirut, told The New York Times that he was in his shop when he heard explosions and saw a man in his 20s fall off a motorbike.
“We all thought he got wounded from a random shooting,” Ayoud said. “Then, a few minutes later, we started hearing of other cases. All were carrying pagers.”
Within minutes, ambulances were rushing through Beirut.
Many of the wounded, screaming in pain, were rushed to hospital on motorbikes. Doctors reported patients with bloodied hands, faces, and eyes.
Iran’s Fars news agency said Mojtaba Amani, the Iranian ambassador in Beirut, had suffered superficial injuries and was under observation in hospital.
Ziad Makary, Lebanon’s information minister, said that the government condemned the detonation of the pagers as an “Israeli aggression”.
Hezbollah blamed Israel for the pager blasts and said it would receive “its fair punishment”.
Israeli officials declined to comment.
One Hezbollah official, speaking to Reuters, described it as the “biggest security breach” the group had suffered in a year of conflict with Israel.
That does not appear to be hyperbole. The questions remain about the mechanism of the attack.
Lebanese internal security forces said a number of wireless communication devices were detonated across the country, especially in Beirut’s southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold.
In today’s tech-obsessed world, the idea of some kind of mass cyber attack causing the pagers’ batteries to overheat or malfunction in some way sounds believable.
It would fit with the current dystopian zeitgeist to learn that our mobile devices are not only destroying our attention spans but could also be turned into bombs.
Fortunately, from the point of view of ordinary pager and electronics users – not to mention their manufacturers – that does not seem to be what happened.
Alan Woodward, a cyber security expert at the university of Surrey, said: “I’ve heard of Lithium ion batteries spontaneously igniting but to make it happen on demand is a different matter entirely.”
“Lithium battery fires and explosions are a general problem but this looks a bit more than this,” agreed Hamish de Bretton Gordon, a retired British Army chemical weapons expert.
“There must be some sort of ‘accelerant’ to make them combust in such a violent fashion – probably some form of high explosive, possibly 10 grams of HMX.”
HMX, also known as octogen, is a widely used military explosive. Mr Woodward guessed the attack might have used C4, another common military explosive.
That would imply a “supply chain attack” in which the perpetrators – and although they are not commenting, that almost certainly means the Israeli security services – had physical access to the devices to embed the explosive.
The impacted devices appeared to have included “rugged” pagers developed by the Taiwanese company Gold Apollo, according to reporters at Bellingcat.
Security sources told Reuters that the devices had been procured in recent months.
The charge could be set to trigger on receipt of a particular message or even simply timed to explode with an old-fashioned timer, said Mr Woodward.
Ken Munro, the founder of the cyber security company Pen Test Partners, said: “I’m leaning hard towards a supply chain attack, as to remotely cause a battery to explode in such a fashion would be extremely challenging.”
Intriguingly, the attack came hours after Israel’s domestic security agency said that it had foiled a similar – though much smaller-scale – plot by Hezbollah.
Shin Bet said in a statement it had seized an explosive device attached to a remote detonation system, using a mobile phone and a camera that Hezbollah had planned to use to kill a former Israeli military official in Tel Aviv.
It said the group had planned to operate the device remotely from Lebanon.
The attack comes a day after Israel’s defence minister said that the country would take military action to return civilians to the north of the country, stoking fears of an all-out Israel-Hezbollah war.
It follows nearly a year of low-level but intensifying conflict, and came a day after the Israeli government made returning evacuated 60,000 civilians to their homes in the north of the country an official war goal.
The fighting began when Hezbollah launched strikes following Israel’s attack on Hamas in Gaza in response to the Oct 7 terrorist attacks.
The conflict has mostly been concentrated along the Lebanon-Israel border, but it has also seen Israeli air strikes across Lebanon and Hezbollah rocket strikes deep into Israel.
Although so far both sides have shied away from attacks on a scale likely to spark a full-scale war, thousands of civilians have fled from both sides of the frontier.
Yoav Gallant, the Israeli defence minister, told Amos Hochstein, a visiting US envoy, this week that the window for a negotiated end to the fighting with Hezbollah was closing.
It meant that “the only way left to ensure the return of Israel’s northern communities to their homes will be via military action”.
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