Taiwanese pager company under scrutiny after attacks

“We may not be a big company but we are a responsible company. This is very embarrassing,” said Hsu Ching-kuang, founder and chairman of Taiwanese company Gold Apollo, whose pagers exploded and injured some 4,000 Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon and Syria yesterday, killing many of them, this morning when Taiwanese police raided the company’s headquarters. Speaking to Reuters, Hsu denied that his small company, which employs just 40 people in New Taipei, had produced the devices used in the attack. He said they were made by a European company called BAC, which had licensed the Gold Apollo brand. “The product was not ours. It just had our brand,” Hsu told reporters, according to Reuters. Gold Apollo’s website was shut down shortly after Hsu issued his denial.

Hezbollah held Israel responsible for yesterday’s explosions, and said its response “will come from an unexpected direction.”

Gold Apollo was founded in 1995, in the heyday of the pager era, as a supplier of devices that displayed only numbers, such as a caller ID or a numeric code. It then moved into making intercoms, radio transmitters, LED displays, and digital pagers like the AR-924, the one used in yesterday’s attack. Before it was taken down, Gold Apollo’s website boasted that the company’s devices were used by hospitals, restaurants, and emergency responders around the world. The company’s Wikipedia entry says it distributes its products primarily in Europe, East Asia, the United States, and several Middle Eastern countries, including Israel, Lebanon, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. The company is privately held, and according to Tradewheel, its annual revenue is less than $10 million.

The terrorist organization Hezbollah purchased thousands of pagers to avoid using newer, more hackable means of communication that might reveal the user’s location, and to pass encrypted messages. Messages can be intercepted, but it is impossible to pinpoint the location of just the users who receive the messages. Hezbollah sought a secure communication channel, but now its vulnerability is clear.

This article was published in Globes, Israeli Business News – en.globes.co.il – on September 18, 2024.

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