‘Splodey Walkie-Talkies?
It just gets more fun.
The brand of allegedly exploding Hezbollah walkie-talkies is Icom, model IV-V82. Icom is a Japanese company, still active in the handheld radio market. Only one small detail: They stopped making that model of walkie-talkies ten YEARS ago. Also stopped making replacement batteries.
Icom exported its IC-V82 two-way radio to regions including the Middle East until October 2014, when it stopped making and selling the devices, the Osaka-based company said in a statement Thursday. It has also discontinued production of the batteries needed to operate the main unit, it said. The company earlier had warned customers that almost all IC-V82s on the market are counterfeit.
Oops… that’s gonna make backtracing them difficult.
From a supply chain viewpoint, someone has a very slick operation going on if they are making them – they would have to reverse engineer the circuit boards, modify the battery units where the explosive was allegedly secreted, probably even have to acquire injection molds for the housings. More likely is that someone acquired a bunch of counterfeit units and modified them.
Among the many outstanding questions is how explosive materials were planted in the devices. If the Icom walkie-talkies are genuine and manufactured a decade ago, it’s likely they were modified well after sale to their original customers. The company can’t determine if the walkie-talkies are its own, but said the exploded devices appear to lack the hologram labels attached to its products.
Supposedly hundreds exploded. Make that a very, very slick operation. No holograms? Almost certainly no one in Icom had anything to do with it.
Icom won a contract in the 1990s to supply the U.S. Department of Defense with transceivers.
Okay, that may be a bit less than comforting. But unless they were acquired from a third party, they are probably OK. I’d still think inspections are in order, hmmm?
The company’s shares rose 2.6% amid a broad rally in Japanese stocks. Time
Category: Israel, Middle East
Killing off senior leadership and discouraging basic methods of communication is gonna leave a mark.
The company’s shares rose 2.6%.
LOL! BRAVO!
Not only would one have to reverse engineer the circuit (as best as possible) for the basic and some of the advanced features (wouldn’t expect to be able to duplicate them all), but some of the ICs would most likely be proprietary and not COTS. So, BRAVO to the shop behind the copy cats.
It may be proprietary but when you’re dealing with the Mossad, anything is possible.
They found a secondary battery manufacturer who makes batteries packed with energy. They only last a second but your transmission can be heard all the way to Hell.
When Phil Monkress of All Points Logistics sold them the radios, he explicitly asked them if they wanted the rust proof/non-exploding option, and they declined. He assured them that these radios were “da bomb”.
Hezbollah investigators traced the explosions to users not ending their transmissions with “Over”, over.
I think “Out” would be more approprate.
I’m thinking Hezy IT is going to hold the feet to the fire on next year’s cyber security training. Like literally.
Don’t plug just any USB drive into your laptop that you think has some first rate goat porn on it until you run a scan disc on it.
New cellphones on the market to replace “throw aways”.
They’re called “blow aways”.
Gives new meaning to “burner’ phone
I understand the call that did it was, “breaker 1 9, this is detonator. How copy over?”
Loud and clear.
Since it appears that Mossad didn’t infiltrate the beeper supply chain because they WERE the supply chain, the same may apply to the ‘splodey w/t’s…
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/09/in-re-op-grim-beeper.php