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That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus

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Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus

#551

Post by ceejayoz »

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #544
ceejayoz wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Freedom of speech, not freedom from consequences. Freedom of speech requires freedom from government consequences. I have freedom of speech still if you say "I don't like your speech"; I don't have it if the cops say "I'm arresting you for your speech". > I would 100% fire someone for celebrating murder. And you can. You can also skip their birthday party. But "I'm glad so-and-so is dead" largely can't be a reason…

> "I'm glad so-and-so is dead" largely can't be a reason to, say, lose your drivers' license, social security benefits, or government employment, because the First Amendment applies to government specifically. Unless I'm mistaken, that's not happening. If it is, it's wrong and should be corrected.

In Jimmy Kimmel's case, the FCC chair threatened ABC's broadcasting licensure to pressure them to punish his (very, very mild, incidentally) protected speech.

Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus

#552

Post by toast0 »

pstation wrote: post #514
BillTthree wrote: post #244

Does anyone know what crime is being investigated? It looks like the malicious activity was sending spam text messages and forwarding international phone calls. Is there a federal regulation against sending spam messages? Is it somehow illegal to have many sim cards in the same place as having many radios? The telco's are also capable of bringing down the network, and they are legally allowed to turn their services o…

In other countries these setups are fairly illegal because it bypasses the international call tariffs that the typically state owned telco company would be entitled to. A local domestic call might cost $.01 per minute and an international call $.20. They call it "bypass fraud". But in the US, I'm not so sure since things are already deregulated.

US doesn't really have bypass fraud as a category, no; there's no real pricing difference based on the source of a call. Inbound international calls don't have to pay extra termination costs vs domestic calls and outbound international calls aren't paying much more than the cost of a local call + whatever the foreign carrier charges for termination. If you were doing bypass fraud in another country for calls to/from the US, you don't need SIM farms in the US, because you could just get a SIP account.

These boxes would be used for pricing arbitrage where a mobile phone user can get 'unlimited' calling or messaging but a bulk messaging/calling customer would have to pay something per message or minute, or to avoid customer identification or restrictions on message that would happen with a bulk account.

Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus

#553

Post by aerostable_slug »

ecocentrik wrote: post #475
55555 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not complicated. This is a normal sort of criminal enterprise. These rooms filled with SIM boxes are all over the world. The owners of them rent out the service to others -- letting them send 1,000 spam messages for a fee. One of the buyers of the service was indeed using it to threaten a politician. But this represents a tiny fraction (less than 1% of 1% of the SIMs normal use -- which is probably mostly phishi…

These enterprises might not be setup by Russia directly but they might be setup by Russian criminal organizations which have been very active in the US over the last 20 years. That nobody in the current administration seem to be concerned with criminal organizations outside of some small or remnant groups from Latin America is very telling all on its own. This administration has never named any Russian gangs in offic…

That's easily falsifiable. Trump's DOJ and Treasury have multiple press releases regarding prosecutions and sanctions against Vory v zakone, thieves-in-law. Just search on either phrase and you'll see them.

Additionally, calling Venezuelan and Mexican cartels like CJNG small or remnant is extremely inaccurate, to be charitable. They are among the largest, best equipped, and most dangerous organized criminals in the world. You don't have be pro-Trump to acknowledge this fact.

Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus

#554

Post by EasyMark »

gaoshan wrote: post #262

There is so much to address in this post but I want to look at just this part: "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. It’s the “Washington Game” of “official…

Author kind of made me trust him about as much as I trust the SS on not exaggerating when he spoke as if only he is an authority because he has declared himself a hacker. I think I might have trusted him more if he said "I used to run one of these SIM farms back in the day"

Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus

#555

Post by EasyMark »

aedocw wrote: post #240

There is a lawyer (Alec Karakatsanis) who has been writing about police driven propaganda for years. His recent book "Copaganda" is fantastic. He carefully breaks down how major papers (NYT is chief among them) create stories that fit a narrative by using very one-sided sources. Like an article on crime written in bad faith where the only people quotes are police, police consultants, and ex-police. It's a really good…

Like touch fentanyl and you'll drop dead from your heart exploding?

Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus

#556

Post by nostrademons »

deelowe wrote: post #527
nostrademons wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's his bio from the RSA conference: https://www.rsaconference.com/experts/robert-graham BlackICE was a big personal firewall 20 or so years ago - you can read all the CNet/ZDNet reviews if you search for it. You can also look at his code (for a port scanner that can scan the entire Internet in 5 minutes, whew) on GitHub: https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/masscan

Thank you for sharing. I recall blackice. I'm not seeing anything here would lead me to believe he's an expert in this particular domain though, which is more about nation state intelligence operations than it is anything technical.

I think his point is that it's not about nation-state intelligence operations, and that the capabilities claimed here are garden-variety cybercriminal operations. You or I could set up something very similar, if we were willing to participate in a dodgy business.

And by some basic napkin math and a few Google searches, he appears to be right. Prepaid sim cards are about $5/each [1]. A 16-port SimBerry server is $499 [2]; their full-fledged servers are "contact us" for pricing, but support up to 18,000 SIM cards [3]. Assuming their enterprise solutions are cheaper on a per-SIM basis than retail, that's about $35/SIM in hardware costs. For $100K in startup capital, you can run a 3000-SIM farm. And then, like this article suggests, once you get started you reinvest the profits: if you assume each SIM card gives you 1000 txts, then if you charge 2c/txt your $5 investment becomes $20 and you can expand your operations accordingly.

I wonder sometimes if, when it comes to cybercrime, "[Russia/North Korea/China/Iran] did it!" is actually code for "The FBI has no idea who did it, but if we said that it would encourage all sorts of script kiddies to do this for profit, so we might as well blame it on our nation-state level adversaries." Many of the hacks in question (eg. ransomware) are not out of reach of a lone malcontent in their 20s with some tech skills.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=prepaid+sim+card

[2] https://www.simberry.com/offers

[3] https://www.simberry.com/equipment/sim-server

Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus

#557

Post by Johnny555 »

I knew they were overhyping the National Security/United Nations impact when they said it was 35 miles from the UN building, in the NYC area there must be hundreds if not thousands of cell sites in that 35 miles. They certainly weren't targeting the UN building.

Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus

#558

Post by chairmansteve »

gaoshan wrote: post #262

There is so much to address in this post but I want to look at just this part: "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. It’s the “Washington Game” of “official…

Your reply only addresses the tone of the article.

His claim is that they busted a common criminal sim farm, with little or no national security implications. You don't address that all.

Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus

#559

Post by poemxo »

picafrost wrote: post #339

I fully agree the narrative is nonsense, the ways, means, and timing of the story is suspect, but I don't buy the "don't trust those experts, trust me, I'm the expert" vibe of this article. Criminal enterprises and nation states aren't mutually exclusive.

I got the same feeling. If anything a nation state would want to operate under the guise of a "normal criminal."

Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus

#560

Post by geeunits »

roody15 wrote: post #98

Once a Chinese grad student explained to me a difference he noted between Chinese and American citizens. He said in China no really reads or watches 24/7 major news outlets in China. They are fully aware that all of it is propaganda and just go about their life. He said Americans seem to get really emotional over content in the press and seem to really struggle with the idea of propaganda / journalism in the news. I…

Sounds like Americans are engaged in a democracy they see the ability to shape whereas China is a lost cause, so just bend over and ignore it? :)
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