- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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This Substack’s subdomain is blocked by my fake news filter so now I’m left wondering: who’s wrong?
The first headline I saw was saying this was a potential attack on UN headquarters. But the article said that these things were found up to 35 miles away. The whole thing looked ridiculous after that given the range of cell phone towers. The one happened to be in the potential area, but there was nothing indicating it was the target of any potential action.
So the whole thing was fishy for the beginning for me.
I’m uncertain about the whole thing now. The pictures of the equipment were certainly large scale enough that it had some sort of financial backing but the implications that they could “shut down every phone in x distance” claims are a bit rich. That’s implying they could flawlessly execute scripts on everyone’s wild hardware and firmware etc.
It’s interesting from a cyber security perspective but these days I’m just worried how someone stupid will spin this and suddenly we’re not allowed to have privacy anymore.
Edit: ig damaging tower digital infrastructure could be possible but a setup that expensive isn’t being done without looking for a profit or informational benefit I think.
It’s like those stories about “we seized enough fentanyl to kill 1,000 people.” Sure, maybe that’s true but that’s not what they were going to do with the fentanyl.
Used in a certain way you use those sims to shut down cell towers, but there’s not much money in that, and there is in sms scams
I thought it was more of a denial of service attack by flooding nearby towers with SIM registration requests causing the infrastructure not to be able to handle other calls, or something along those lines.
My first thought was a bunch of sims in a room with no door.
Thanks for this, that NYT article stank of bullshit.
If it was just another SMS spam service and they accidentally discovered it: Still thanks to those guys for actually doing the people and country a service.
Could those farms being used to overload services or cell towers? Maybe.
The substack article is off in a number of parameters. It talks about 100 SIMs and 20 broadband radios per device. Maybe this authors knowledge was a bit outdated, and he didn’t look closely at the pictures, which show a different picture.
Those trays had 256 sim cards each, and there were quite a lot of those boxes. And the device also has 256 antennae, which implies that it also has 256 broadband modules.
All in all a different thing than just rotating a number of SIM cards around to occasionally send an SMS. Assuming that those boxes have a closer grip on what the individual radio device does, a kind of coordinated action cannot be ruled out.
I think about the difference between early Bitcoin mining computers and professional mining equipment. At first people just used a desktop machine with a beefy graphics card. Then once people realized how much money was in it they iterated, and people started manufacturing devices custom designed for mining, and building operations in warehouses that were close to cheap power sources.
Same here, initially people have individual cell phones and are doing things manually, then they start to refund the process and use devices specifically made for that purpose, including arrays of sims which can be controlled centrally from a master computer. Just because it’s sophisticated doesn’t mean it’s a state actor or terrorism. (Of course still good it’s shut down)
