Thwarted Plot To Cripple Cell Service In NY Was Bigger Than First Thought (go.com)
- Reference: 0179646150
- News link: https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/25/10/03/2131218/thwarted-plot-to-cripple-cell-service-in-ny-was-bigger-than-first-thought
- Source link: https://abcnews.go.com/US/thwarted-plot-cripple-cell-service-ny-bigger-thought/story?id=126057249
> Investigators secured each of those locations, seized the electronics, and are now trying to track down who rented the spaces and filled them with shelves full of gear capable of sending 30 million anonymous text messages every minute, overloading communications and blacking out cellular service in a city that relies on it for emergency response and counterterrorism.
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> According to sources, the investigation began after several high-level people, including at least one with direct access to President Donald Trump, were targeted not only by swatters but also with actual threats received on their private phones.
"The potential threat these data centers pose to the public could include shutting down critical resources that the public needs, like the 911 system, or potentially impacting the public's ability to communicate everything, including business transactions," said Don Mihalek, an ABC News contributor who was formerly with the Secret Service.
[1] https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/09/23/1441229/us-secret-service-dismantles-telecommunications-threat
[2] https://abcnews.go.com/US/thwarted-plot-cripple-cell-service-ny-bigger-thought/story?id=126057249
Would be a weird plot (Score:4, Insightful)
First of all, if you have so many devices at one spot, you'd essentially just overload a few cells. Second mobile networks are used to operating at 100% utilization, priorities are normal, particularly for things like emergency calls.
Besides if you wanted to DoS cells you could just use normal jamming, or if you want to be fancy and less easy to detect, just request a channel for authentication. You wouldn't need a SIM-card for that.
What seems more likely is that they build some sort of in official network interconnection. One can earn money by bringing calls from one country into another country. Interconnection fees are weird, so offloading calls into the mobile network may be cheaper than doing it via an official interconnect. This is also true for things like SMS.
Re:Would be a weird plot (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually you'd be wrong. You're focus is on the wrong part of the chain, the goal here isn't to overload the individual cells, it's to overload the routing computer which registers all devices and tracks across which cell system they reside in. For cellular systems SMS and traditional calls aren't just another network packet. There's a reason calls don't drop and SMSes still work even when towers are overloaded to the point where no one can even read a tweet. Routing for those is done by the same system which tracks where devices are on the network. Overload that system and it all goes down without even so much as a youtube's video worth of bandwidth.
I guarantee you the cellular system of any large city is not remotely designed for that completely unforeseeable level of traffic in that part of a protocol. Ironically though those SMSes could all be handled by a single 5G connection if it were just another IP protocol.
Re: (Score:3)
Well half of the team I work at handles exactly those things, and while in the past this was an issue as it was handled via individual 64k TDM links... this now goes via Ethernet... and even though part of the software we use is written in Java, it's essentially just idling. Before there is even a noticable load on the signaling, the radio channel certainly will already be congested beyond being useful.
Re: (Score:2)
As the summary says, the previous 100k sims were in 5 vacant offices and apartments in and around the city. It's highly unlikely that the 200k they seized this time were in one location.
I'm not convinced this SIM farm was special (Score:5, Insightful)
We have seen so many SIM farms before, some with even more SIMs operated in parallel, being used by mundane criminals, like SPAMmers, SCAMmers, advertisers. So far I have not read about evidence these New York SIM farms were anything different from those criminal operations - even if some people rented some of their capacity to harass politicians... which appears to be the only reason why this was investigated by the Secret Service, which otherwise does not give a shit whether ordinary people are SPAMmed or SCAMmed.
Re: I'm not convinced this SIM farm was special (Score:5, Interesting)
Worth your read:
[1]https://cybersect.substack.com... [substack.com]
[1] https://cybersect.substack.com/p/that-secret-service-sim-farm-story
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks for that, I suspected this was the case from the beginning. Gotta beat those war drums louder, people aren't enthusiastic enough yet to go kill people who never did anything to them.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm skeptical that NYT would just collude with the Trump admin like that. It seems like the last thing they'd ever want to do.
Moreover, lately this site seems to do a 180 at the drop of a hat.
[1]https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
[1] https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/10/02/1612223/trust-in-media-at-new-low-of-28-in-us
Re:I'm not convinced this SIM farm was special (Score:5, Informative)
Technically, they Secret Service has jurisdiction over crimes committed with computers. They don't normally do much with it, and when they do, they have a history of [1]not doing it well [sjgames.com], but legally, they certainly can.
In this case, I'm sure you're right, they got involved because of threats to public officials, which is something they do a lot of (along with chasing counterfeit money).
[1] https://www.sjgames.com/SS/
Re: (Score:2)
Seems like in 2025 they're more about ignoring threats to public officials, and producing counterfeit money.
Actually that second part might be delegated to other parts of the executive branch. But they're definitely stepping back protection of public officials whose names don't start with T and end with rump. Because, you know, they're so concerned about political violence.
Re: (Score:2)
I was watching a video that pointed out the devices these SIM cards were in could only use a small number of the cards simultaneously. And even if you ignore this, 100,000 sim cards is a small fraction of the total number of legitimate devices in NYC, so simultaneous usage would not have had much effect. So they are probably just used for mass-spamming and similar campaigns.
It’s for spamming (Score:3)
It’s for spamming sms and advertising click fraud. It was only investigated because politicians received threats. Otherwise it would still be spamming away.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm thinking this is the most likely scenario too. Another organized crime fraud operation rather than little yellow men twirling their mustachios out to defile our precious bodily fluids.
Re: (Score:2)
Why not use an internet SMS gateway?
Re: (Score:2)
Because there are essentially only 2 or 3 SMS gateways, which all have really damn good filtering at scale.
Not talked about much, but the backhaul SMS network (known as "aggregators") is similar to the internet in that there are large backhaul providers and then "last mile" providers (such as cell carriers, or companies like apple / google / twilio) that all run through the same aggregators.
The aggregators are pretty damn good at processing / filtering spam. Also, when you see text messages that say you can
Worried about 911? (Score:2)
We just found out recently that across two states, the physical network used to handle the routing for 911 calls was not shovel-redundant. Probably someone stuffing MPLS-over-MPLS again.
Re: (Score:2)
You mean their ring was a straight line.