Taiwan firm Gold Apollo denies it made pagers used in Lebanon attacks

By Jane Lanhee Lee
 

The Taiwanese company Gold Apollo Co. denied it manufactured the pagers used in attacks across Lebanon, following media reports that identified the low-profile firm as the supplier of the devices.
 

“Those devices aren’t ours,” said a company official, asking not to be named before a formal statement. “We didn’t manufacture the pagers.”

She said Gold Apollo licenses its brand to at least one other company, though she declined to provide any names.

On Tuesday, thousands of pagers exploded across Lebanon, killing at least nine people and wounding almost 3,000. The militant group Hezbollah accused Israel of orchestrating the attack, raising fears of an all-out war after near-daily skirmishes for much of the last year. Israel declined to comment.

 

One of the outstanding questions is how the blasts were planned and then triggered with such coordination. Small amounts of explosive were planted in beepers that Hezbollah had ordered, the New York Times reported, citing US and other officials briefed on the operation.

Just one or two ounces of the material was added next to the battery of each pager, and a switch was embeded to trigger the detonation, the newspaper reported. Devices exploded simultaneously around the country at about 3:30 pm.

At Gold Apollo headquarters on Wednesday, founder Hsu Ching-Kuang also told reporters that his company hadn’t made the devices, according to Reuters. 

The company began operations in 1995 and sells alphanumeric pagers as well as the kind of beepers that alert customers in restaurants that their order is ready. With 40 employees according to its website, Gold Apollo is low profile even within Taiwan’s tech community. 

It’s not clear where the pagers were manufactured or when the explosives were added to the devices.

The wireless devices likely overheated before the blasts took place, indicating “foul play,” Lebanon’s Telecommunications Minister Johnny Corm told Bloomberg. Lebanon’s government also described the events as an Israel attack.

With no official explanations, theories began to circulate about how devices considered long outmoded could have been turned into such lethal weapons. 

One cybersecurity expert, Robert Graham, said on X that “making batteries do anything more than burn is very hard and implausible. Far more plausible is that somebody bribed the factory to insert the explosives.”

Deepa Kundur, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Toronto, said she suspects it was a “supply chain deployment.” In such an attack, she said, the perpetrator would infiltrate the pager’s upstream supply chain to manufacture a critical component with a built-in explosive charge, without the final vendor knowing. The explosive component could sit in a pager for months or years before being detonated on receipt of a message that triggers the modified part.

Pagers have been supplanted by mobile phones in much of the world, although NPR recently reported that doctors in US hospitals continue to favor their no-nonsense messaging. Pagers are also routinely used in medical facilities in Lebanon.

Hezbollah operatives use low-tech devices such as pagers and walkie-talkies to avoid interceptions of their communications by Israeli intelligence. They can send encrypted messages without giving away their location.