from the very-very-scary dept
The Secret Service says it has uncovered what it’s calling “a community of digital units situated all through the New York Tri-state space that have been used to conduct a number of telecommunications-related threats directed in the direction of senior U.S. authorities officers.” The information was introduced, partially, over on the proper wing propaganda web site run by an overt white supremacist billionaire:
There are, nevertheless, some pink flags that that is being over-hyped for consideration and impact. Together with plenty of utterly unsupported language about what this tech “might be” used for.
In its press release, the Secret Service claims to have found round 300 co-located SIM servers and 100,000 SIM playing cards throughout a number of websites. The press launch makes some obscure hints of the networks having connections to recognized nation state actors:
“Whereas forensic examination of those units is ongoing, early evaluation signifies mobile communications between nation-state risk actors and people which might be recognized to federal regulation enforcement.”
I strongly suspect they stumbled into some mob-connected rip-off ring or textbot farm, and are over-hyping this for dramatic impact. The announcement is tremendous obscure, and whereas the Secret Service claims this community may have been used to disrupt communications forward of an upcoming Common Meeting UN assembly, there’s no proof of that, and plenty of the {hardware} was collected over a 35 mile vary:
“These units have been concentrated inside 35 miles of the worldwide assembly of the United Nations Common Meeting now underway in New York Metropolis. Given the timing, location and potential for vital disruption to New York telecommunications posed by these units, the company moved rapidly to disrupt this community.”
There are plenty of issues inside 35 miles of the UN, together with a plethora of Dunkin’ Donut areas.
Whereas this all sounds scary, it appears extraordinarily unlikely that this assortment of 100,000 SIM playing cards in use over this broad of an space may have ever meaningfully impacted mobile communications in New York Metropolis, which sees between 9 and twelve million mobile customers day-after-day.
The mainstream headline protection of the discover (which once more, included no supporting proof of any sort that NYC was at precise, critical threat), have been all appropriately hyperbolic, treating the risk to the UN and NYC itself as some form of confirmed. None bothered to ask questions of any community engineers, or level out that the Secret Service supplied actually zero supporting proof for its bolder claims:
Cops routinely lie, and our consolidated company mainstream journalism genuinely sucks at pointing that out. However there’s additionally ongoing proof of normalcy bias, whereby the press seemingly forgets that the U.S. authorities has additionally now been taken over by radical authoritarian zealots who’ve completely zero reservations about mendacity about every thing, consistently.
Filed Beneath: fraud, scammers, scams, secret service, sim cards, telecom
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