I'm a little surprised that a behavioral analysis didn't flag these anyway. Probably did, just the networks don't care as long as they get their cut.
Use VPNs? Surely paying for some subscriptions at $3/month is cheaper than renting an apartment in manhattan?
disclosure: I'm an investor/advisor in massive.
Pretty clear this is the case, almost all of it could be stopped overnight with a simple whitelist to people you know and a blocklist of countries and regions where you’ll never ever need to take a call from.
What about sending spam and threaths over one of these SIMs? I'm pretty sure that warrants legal action.
A lot of things are not, but US for a while has been on a path that suggests that whether something is legal or not is not the standard. The standard is basically, based partially on personal vibes.
Naturally, this comes years after it was normalized in banking, red flag laws and so on, so I suppose this is not a surprise, but I am surprised that people are making 'this is not illegal argument'.
In this setup, illegal does not matter. If it is suspicious, you are in trouble. For example, I invite you to look at DHS/FBI 'signs'[1][2] to report by private orgs:
- Producing or sharing music, videos, memes, or other media that could reflect justification for violent extremist beliefs or activities
Note the could and despair at the future we are gleefully approaching.
Anyway, I don't disagree with you on principle, but I want you to understand that the system behaves differently these days.
https://tripwire.dhs.gov/documents/us-violent-extremist-mobi... https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/counterterrorism/us-viol...
Just tell people that this is the sort of setup that is used by (overseas) scammers to send messages to thousands of potential victims at a time to rope them into various scams.
Fighting scammers is a hugely popular thing with the general public. No need to dress it up with that U.N. nonsense to get the general public's approval. People wouldn't even have minded that the Secret Service ended up uncovering a scammer support operation whilst tracking down something else.
And now the SS foiling attacks against the UN! Wow, omg! But also, I mean, why do we even care, all they gave us was a broken escalator and teleprompter, amiright?
And that's the point. No-one would have thought bad of them for following up on stuff within their bailiwick and uncovering a scam support operation. It's the old caught-the-major-bad-guy-in-a-routine-traffic-stop tale, after all.
Yeah makes a lot of sense when framed like this, the timing of the secret service of all people busting this 'huge' operation was far too suspicious.
`site:nytimes.com “speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation”` has no earlier results
Other outlets have used “speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation” before though.
Overall I found the substack author to tell a good story and speak with what seems to be relevant technical experience so I reposted the link that I saw in another hn thread as a separate story, but as other commentors have pointed out it's possible that both he and the original journalist are hyping up conspiracies in both directions (compromised press vs state actor hackers) and actually the truth is often a more boring mid ground (Journalists hyping up stories and shady people doing shady things)
It could be just a scam bot farm but a scam bot farm with the intention of targeting vulnerable UN delegates with scams not necessarily to disrupt any cell tower?
I don't mean this in derogatory sense. I wasslightly...hm...confused when reading this. When I see something in the news, to the degree that I trust the source, I see it only as a statement of fact, and unless I trust the commentator, I ignore the comment. I only expect descriptive accuracy from the news. This sometimes requires resources that individuals don't generally have.
When I read a personal blog article articulating a personal opinion, presenting evidence and trying to make a case for their conclusion, I usually apply a different standard. From them, I expect sound reasoning, which often requires a form of independence/neutrality that news organizations don't have.
And I can't say that this article is structured as a sequence of QEDs, so to speak. It doesn't seem like the conclusions follow from the premisses. That's not to say is wrong, just that if it is right, it would be in part by accident.
No, they put this in lower manhattan because of the cell density there. It makes the fraud harder to detect in all the noise of normal usage.
Cell networks are not my area of expertise, but cybersecurity is, so I am genuinely interested to learn more.
And how is it even supposed to work? How are you going to handle billing? Does a cell phone tower even know the phone number of the connected devices? What's going to happen when the recipient disconnects mid-SMS? What happens when the same number is in use by multiple SIM cards?
It would have been so much easier to be closer to the UNGA and then it would be more effective if that was the intent.
If one is setting up to target the U.N. one does not need this sort of setup to do so. Grand Central Station and the Chrysler Building are just as (in)valid a guess at some purported central target, which one does not have to enclose. The 35 mile radius is ludicrous, and very probably a "telephone game" garbling by PR people of the rough range of SMS to a 2G cell tower given certain conditions. And targetting just a few delegates for scams, with kit that costs thousands of quid per gateway box, is stupidity. The scams thrive on large volumes because they don't net 100% of the marks.
This is a way of having VOIP on one side and what will appear to callees like (doing some simple arithmetic based upon the various photographs) a few hundred (in the site where they're on the floor) to several thousand (in the site where they're on garage shelving along the wall) seemingly legitimate cell phones in multiple locations on the other side. The far more sensible hypotheses are an (overseas) scam support operation, or a dodgy telco operator of some kind.
Is it time to stop treating somebody's IP address as an authentication factor yet?
Edit:ascii emoji fail
I cannot conceive of a reason why that would occur
The real question here is who and what it was intended to warn off, and you'll never get a real answer to that.
I ask god to make the people I bullshit all agree with you about this. Please don't pay attention to the details; in fact, they were probably placed there by our enemies to distract us from the story (that I told you.) In fact, you're a genius, and this goes deeper than even I thought. I'm going to need access to your bank account.
To be honest, with the contents of the post, probably neither. It's fine if you want to point at different sources and go "ooooh WEF" and make scare quotes with your hands, but that's not actually evidence it's just a description of your existing bias.
Frankly, the overstating of the threat in the original article is frankly about as bad as the overstating of the article being bogus. The feds shut down some sim farm. Is is a massive national security threat? Probably no, that's a bit of an overstatement. The NYTimes ran a clickbaity article, is it bogus? Probably no, that's a bit of an overstatement.
I don't understand why people like this get so wound up by the way places like the NYTimes write up articles. This is the way journalism is written, you don't write articles that say "X happened, but it's probably fine!". You write "X happened, and it could have Y impact!". People are smart enough to read the article and understand, we don't need you making baseless accusations about their sourcing.
I believe we're making very similar points in essence - see my other reply. Personally, I'd say that foreign security services having some involvement in this is slightly more plausible. If nothing else, just because some are basically nation-wide gang states, which very well could be doing this just for monetary reasons. Seems a bit more likely, not much, than a fed agency trying to do something (unclear what the author claim is about the point of the lie - "hype it up", I guess), concluding that lying about what they know in a case is a good way to do it, and choosing this case and this particular lie.
When I read a personal blog article articulating a personal opinion, presenting evidence and trying to make a case for their conclusion, I usually apply a different standard. From them, I expect sound reasoning, which often requires a form of independence/neutrality that news organizations don't have.
And let's just say this article is not exactly structured as a sequence of QEDs, so to speak. It doesn't seem like the conclusions follow from the premisses. That's not to say it's wrong, just that if it is right, it would be in part by accident.
When Bobby tries to convince his friend Jimmy that Charlie is lying, you shouldn't trust him if he says that "I know that Charlie is lying because apples are green".
> One of the reasons we know this story is bogus is because of the New York Times story which cites anonymous officials, “speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation”. That’s not a thing, that’s not a valid reason to grant anonymity under normal journalistic principles.
I'm not even sure the apple is green! If you search `site:nytimes.com “anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation"` you'll see that this news outlet has done this multiple times in the past.
I suppose "valid" and "normal" are giving the author a bunch of wiggle room here, but he never backs this claim up.
If, for whatever reason, the agency feels like it's not risking its own case and wants to blow its trumpet... it really doesn't matter what the names of the spokespeople for the agency are. They don't need to speak anonymously, as they won't get in trouble with anyone at the agency for saying what the agency told them to say to the press. The NYT could just say "officials said" and not name them.
It is not like there is a whistleblower inside the Secret Service with scuttlebutt to dish, and the NYT need to protect the identity of Deep Throat 2.0... and all they had to say was the spam operation itself didn't pose any threat to the UN conference.
I think what the blog author's arguing is that this phrase is unnecessary detail that just adds intrigue to sell a rather mundane story.
I think scatterbrained, vibes based almost-theories that vaguely imitate real arguments but don't actually have the logical structure, are unfortunately common and important to be able to recognize. This article gets a lot of its rhetorical momentum from simply declaring it's fake and putting "experts" in scare quotes over and over. It claims the article is "bogus" while agreeing that the sim cards are real, were really found, really can crash cell towers, and can hide identities. It also corrects things that no one said (neither the tweet nor the NYT article they link to refer to the cache of sim cards as "phones" yet the substack corrects this phrasing).
The strongest argument makes is about the difference between espionage and cell tower crashing and the achievability of this by non state actors (it would cost "only" $1MM for anyone to do this), but a difference in interpretation is a far cry from the article actually being bogus. And the vagueposting about how quoting "high level experts" proves that the story is fake is so ridiculous I don't even know what to say. Sure, the NYT have preferred sources who probably push preferred narratives, but if you think that's proof of anything you don't know the difference between vibes and arguments.
So I completely understand GPs point and wish more comments were reacting in the same way.
After everything the gov't has tried to hype in the last decade (I'm including some things under Biden's term too), and esp. the efforts made in Trump second term, sure seems like it checks out to me.
So maybe you could name one of the conclusions and its premises, and describe how they don't follow. Cause I certainly don't follow what you're on about.
SIM farms are normal, common things that exist all over the place to allow messages from far-away senders to be sent as if they came from a local number.
That’s all the author is asking us to believe.
Meanwhile, many US companies won't let me, the actual legitimate user they're trying to authenticate, use Google Voice, because it's "so dangerous and spoofable, unlike real SIM cards".
Hopefully this helps a little bit in driving that point home.
It's always funny to see comments like this; because there's always at least 50/50 chance that the article is from someone that is actually prolific, just that the person has a blind-spot for whatever reason.
That is, also, the case here.
Really? I see a difference between 24h infotainment news and News.
The News I listen to (AM radio) is compacted into fact, point, counterpoint. And that’s it. When it repeats, no more news. I’m old enough to remember this basic News playbook, and it’s not changed on those stations I listen to.
No. This is not how any of this works
Just use SIP?
The boxes all basically turn the cell lines into SIP trunks, then they’re used for grey routes for international VoIP providers to dodge termination fees into the target country and get cheaper per-minute rates, because the game of pennies really adds up in telecoms traffic.
We get it you have some political bent and don't like those in charge, but given the professionalism of the setup you don't know how quickly it was setup. If the place was rented last month that _is_ a $1M investment all up front. If it's over time it's still a professional setup all the same by people looking to abuse the system in some way or other for profit. I.e. unknown threat actor until proved proven otherwise.
Honestly picking at a public body bigging up the work they do for the public isn't worth a rant. If this was close enough to the UN buildings and Embassy's to cause a problem then yes. That becomes an international issue. Do you honestly think if this was just a scam farm they wouldn't take money from someone else to burn the thing and turn the city into a circus?
Besides if this was an agency with tech skill but limited funding, like a certain northern province in Asia, they'd bankroll it by scamming to start anyway wouldn't they.
With the number of radios seen in the photos from the original story, there must have been a great deal of SMS from that structure. That is very easy to spot with low cost equipment: a TinySA[1] and a directional antenna should be sufficient. Hams do "fox hunting" with similarly basic equipment.
Given the resources of cell operators, the most charitable explanation for how something like this can exist for more than a brief interval is total indifference.
[1] The more recent versions ($150+) are pretty powerful and can see all 4G/5G bands.
And why should they care?
A paying customer is a paying customer, never mind the health and integrity of the public phone network (which coincidentally also serves as the primary identification and authentication method for ~everybody in the US).
I tend to agree with student, NYT and major news outlets are clearly used for propaganda and if you sit back and look at it from perhaps another angle it makes sense , why wouldn’t a world super power with a massive government apparatus use media to influence and control citizen behavior?
So yes the anonymous experts, the anonymous intelligence experts, the experts on CNN panels .. etc etc. It’s the government pushing a narrative for a purpose. My two cents live your life and spend your precious emotional energy for the people you care about around you. Do things in your local community and help when and where you can.
> Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.
> Be as courageous as you can. If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die in unfreedom.
Being informed just enough to choose the less horrible of the two clowns the systems presents you... takes very little effort. Everything past that is a waste of brain cycles. Spend your energy on things you can affect. If you care about your children then spend the emotional energy on your friends, family and community. It'll help them more
While it is in nobody's interest to care, individually, we're all better off if we care and act just a little bit.
Whenever I see a major negative news story about republicans I always visit the Fox News website and you’re lucky if it’s a sub heading at the bottom. If it’s a particular bad story there will always be a Biden or Hillary story dug up as a headliner to change the narrative.
Westerners voluntarily tune into their propaganda, leaving the 24/7 news channels blaring.
But there is a critical difference in that elections do happen, they do get counted, and they do make a genuine difference in the political and economic outcomes which affect millions of people.
Now I know why.
JdeBP•3h ago