U.S. Secret Service disrupts telecom network that threatened NYC during U.N. General Assembly
U.S. Secret Service disrupts telecom network that threatened NYC during U.N. General Assembly
www.cbsnews.com
U.S. Secret Service disrupts telecom network that threatened NYC during U.N. General Assembly
"In total, law enforcement discovered 300 SIM servers – over 100,000 SIM cards – enabling encrypted, anonymous communication and capable of sending 30 million text messages per minute. Officials say the servers were so powerful they could have disabled cell phone towers and launched distributed denial of services attacks with the ability to block emergency communications like EMS and police dispatch."
100,000 sim cards... Trying to wrap my brain around that one.
The cheapest cell phone plan is, what? $30 a month? So $3 million just to establish service?
How does that even work? If it all went through one carrier, that would look even more sus, so they must have done the math with x% on major carriers and y% on MVNOs or something.
But why bother with sims when you can send texts from email accounts? 🤔
you don't put these SIMs in phones, these go into dedicated devices with very limited functions that pretend to look like phones to operator, dozens per. it can work like a proxy with massive number of outputs
stuff like this https://www.vice.com/en/article/video-ukraine-busts-alleged-russian-bot-farm-using-thousands-of-sim-cards/
also, presumably lots of these cards got burned quite fast, so not all were active at the same time, and some were spares
First of all, I imagine the budget for state-sponsored espionage and interference is quite high. They may have also not been tied to your typical postpaid plan through a major carrier. You can get prepaid lines and different types of service, such as for IoT devices. These may be a couple bucks per month and are meant to send messages and generally small amounts of data for decea such as SmartThings trackers.
Edit to add: but yeah, 100k SIM cards does seem like a lot. They could probably create havoc on the local cell towers.
The limit on the radio side is vastly different than the one on handling incoming sms for a telco. Saturation on the radio side is relatively easy to achieve. To a large extent without fully active SIM cards or with super cheap ones like m2m cards.