Three men are facing 44 charges in Toronto SMS Blaster arrests

https://www.tps.ca/media-centre/stories/unprecedented-sms-blaster-arrests/

43•gnabgib•1h ago

Comments

nubinetwork•54m ago

This was hugely overblown in the media... While the device operates like a stingray, they were using it to spam and phish. The whole claim of "we've never seen this type of device before in Canada" is a lie, because the government and law enforcement both use them. I guess it's okay if they do it, but nobody else can...

panny•45m ago

A government backdoor was found and abused by criminals? No one could have predicted this! :)

Jolter•40m ago

It’s not exactly a back door. It’s a fake radio cell, mimicking your network provider and acting like a man in the middle. In that sense, it’s like a stingray. The differences are

1. The Stingray eavesdrops, but avoids interfering with user traffic

2. The stingray is operated by law enforcement, not by fraudsters looking to steal your money

QuantumNomad_•36m ago

Isn’t it less of a government backdoor and more of a result of generally old and insecure protocols still being in use for telecom?

Like, the phones happily connect to these fake towers because the signal is strongest from that one and there is no authentication to verify who the tower belongs to, nor encryption of SMSes?

mc32•33m ago

Yes I think they mean they hadn’t seen it used before outside of sanctioned organizations. Though one could argue some induce with they org likely used it outside of official capacity though not likely with knowledge or approval by superiors.

dreamlayers•35m ago

How is this possible? Are phones willing to connect to any cell and blindly trust that text messages from there are genuine and really coming from the numbers they claim to be coming from? Isn't there some cryptographic verification?

opengrass•27m ago

Guessing the spammer doesn't want to overload towers or be foxed within the same 3 so they're driving. Maybe the hats(?) shut off on rotation... or eSIM?

capitalhilbilly•25m ago

The original standards weren't expecting anyone but carriers to send messages and ramping up security has been a slow process, so downgrade attacks probably work nicely.

mcpherrinm•23m ago

2g networks didn't have the phone verify the network, so yes they can do this.

At least as of today, most phones have an option to turn off 2g but that isn't a default.

opengrass•21m ago

Plausible. Only Rogers still has working 2G.

Scoundreller•5m ago

And if you have a modern enough SIM+phone combo, it won’t even display the 2g network as an available network, nor 3G on my device.

mcpherrinm•4m ago

It doesn't matter what the network is doing; the phone needs to disable 2g.

Android has it as a toggle: https://source.android.com/docs/security/features/cellular-s...

iPhone disables it for phones in lockdown mode.

rafram•34m ago

Why would someone use one of these instead of good old fashioned SMS / iMessage / email spam?

mcpherrinm•22m ago

There's zero spam filtering interfering this way, and you can target your messages very precisely.

topspin•19m ago

Charges? Cool. In the US we find huge SIM farms in major cities[1], law enforcement shrugs, and everyone forgets about it.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/how-sim-farms-like-the-o...

Joel_Mckay•12m ago

Not really, the FCC regularly drops >$300k fines on people not creative enough to figure out a revenue model than doesn't irritate everybody. =3

nightpool•10m ago

"Law enforcement shrugs"? The whole focus of the article is about how the secret service confiscated those devices and charged the SIM farm operators with crimes. Which part of that is shrugging?

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