James Pearson

James Pearson is European Cybersecurity Correspondent at Reuters, where he reports on hacks, leaks and digital espionage across the region. His previous assignments were as a foreign correspondent in Hanoi, Pyongyang and Seoul, where he published 'North Korea Confidential', a book about daily life in North Korea. At Reuters, he combines the application of cybersecurity tools with old fashioned shoe leather reporting to enable investigations into a broad array of ‘offline’ subjects.

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Talk: How Israel’s bulky pager fooled Hezbollah: An invisible detonator and wafer-thin plastic explosives turned batteries into bombs

The batteries inside Mossad’s weaponised pagers, part of an Israeli plot to decimate Hezbollah, had powerfully deceptive features and an Achilles' heel: They had to be big enough to contain explosives, and come across as convincing, pre-existing products. To overcome this weakness, Mossad created fake online stores, pages and posts that helped deceive Hezbollah due diligence. This talk will delve into some of the previously unreported OSINT techniques used by Reuters in its investigation into the 2024 pager bombings in Lebanon last year.

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