The US Secret Service has dismantled a network of SIM farms in and around New York City it claims was behind multiple incidents targeting senior government officials and had enough power to disrupt entire cellular networks.
The network – or at least the parts the Secret Service has discovered – was massive, consisting of more than 300 colocated SIM servers, controlling more than 100,000 SIM cards, set up at multiple locations. All of the facilities the Secret Service discovered were located throughout the New York Tri-state area (NY, New Jersey, and Connecticut) but all within 35 miles of the UN headquarters building in NYC.
OK so what does one of those rackmount cellphone arrays do and how does it target people? I could see it turning on all of the modems simultaneously and overwhelming a network. But I can’t figure out what it does to an individual besides a denial of service.
I strongly believe a lot of the reporting is hyperbole.
If you’re going to run an offshore call center for spam, and domestic carriers are locking you out, this is how you’d get around it.
Those texts you get “Hey remember that movie on Thursday?” to bait you into a convo?
Those calls from the IRS telling you to send $2500 in Walmart gift cards?
Those can all come from these en mass.
And the best spot to put them is in ultra dense areas where millions of people live to fly under the radar.
They can have thousands and thousands of SIMs, rotate IMEIs, those can as far as I’m aware bridge physical devices from anywhere and make them appear as though they’re here.
Think fake reviews, fake social media, social media bots, scam call center operations, etc.
Could they overload a region? Sure, just like a football game, or major event when everyone calls at once.
That’s not why you’d have all those sims though.
Ah yes…and all those accounts that ask for a mobile number and send a code to verify when you sign up? You could easily sign up thousands of fake accounts with a sim farm.
Probably a safe bet that proximity to the UN HQ was not a factor in placement of these things.
Yeah I think you’re exactly right that these are just spamming and scamming operations.
That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out too. I also understand you can rotate through them for sending spam texts.
I have used machine like this. When we send thousands SMS, cell phone client in that area can’t send/receive SMS or make a phone call. This was a long time ago.
Maybe you could have them all message a single individual? I’ve never received 100s of messages a second from multiple numbers but it doesn’t really sound that distructive since blocking numbers is so easy.
Even if they were to send endless messages to an individual number, I don’t think it would cause any form of destruction or danger. It would just be denial of service. The cellphone backend might even put that number in a penalty box and refuse its connection. Again, just a denial of service.
I’m thinking the article is full of shit.
