If the objective is to knock out cell towers, just jam them. It's clearly a SIM farm for middle-man communications. It just happened to be close to where the UN were.
Close being 35km.
I think it's 35 miles (X 1.6).
That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus
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Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus
#32Both scenarios could be right? 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?
You're right, it could be the sensible most likely thing AND the far-fetched thing.
You're assuming the conclusion in order to argue against it. It's slightly surprising to me that this is not obvious and actually, pretty common. You can't argue against X ("It isn't completely obvious that is bogus") by assuming X ("far-fetched thing").
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.
Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus
#33Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus
#34You know I dont really care to "set the story straight" on lowlifes with a million modems for scams or spam or what other possible activities these were up to that are a guaranteed net negative to this world.
No one’s suggesting giving their stuff back. The Secret Service bullshitting the public is still an issue.
Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would you need to target "vulnerable UN delegates" from blocks away from the UN, though? Literally anywhere in the US would do. It's literally SMS , the location of the transmitter says nothing about the location of the recipient. 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.
I believe if you connect directly to the tower a phone is connected to you can bypass central spam filters.
Why?
Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus
#36Wow, government-led mobile proxy network. Did they attempt to build a search index? :-)
Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus
#37It's actually a combination of warning and bait, and it's not the first story like that nor will it be the last. Picking at the details of it misses the point. The real question here is who and what it was intended to warn off, and you'll never get a real answer to that.
The answer to that may be “no one”. The more likely scenario is they exaggerated a mundane crime into an exciting one.
Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus
#38Both scenarios could be right? 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?
> the intention of targeting vulnerable UN delegates with scams not necessarily to disrupt any cell tower?
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.
Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus
#39It's actually a combination of warning and bait, and it's not the first story like that nor will it be the last. Picking at the details of it misses the point. The real question here is who and what it was intended to warn off, and you'll never get a real answer to that.
You make it sound like there must be a real high-Level strategic reason behind this. More likely it’s just a low level face-saving exercise. Someone probably spent 10s of millions of Secret Service budget chasing some threatening text messages sent to government officials, and in the end what they have to show for it is taking down a $1 million spam operation. So they hype it as a cyber-espionage threat anyway to make themselves look good.
Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus
#40>Who are you going to trust, these Washington insiders, “people who matter”, or an actual hacker like myself?
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.