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That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus

cybersect.substack.com

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Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus

#61

Post by alansammarone »

lazide wrote: post #52
alansammarone wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

Is this a bot? This reply has been essentially pasted into several places now in this article.

No, I'm not a bot, I just wanted it have it as reply to the article itself too, separate from this reply. It has been pasted exactly once and edited accordingly. Also, my account is 15 years old :)

Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus

#62

Post by WastedCucumber »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #28
bilekas wrote: post #15

> 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 leaks”, disseminating propaganda without being held accountable. 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.

Also seems to be the first time NYT has used that form of words according to Google `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.

Just in a cursory check into some of the other articles using the phrase, it seems like they're mostly cases where an investigator might encounter retaliation for speaking out. It's hard to imagine that happening for the present example.

Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus

#64

Post by matthewdgreen »

alansammarone wrote: post #41

I felt slightly...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, presenti…

The novel information in this article (confirmed by some technical experts on other platforms) is that this kind of SMS scam relay is a well-known sort of enterprise. I wasn’t aware of this, although it doesn’t surprise me. Once you have that context, the rest of the NYT article kind of falls apart by itself.

Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus

#65

Post by lovich »

cenamus wrote: post #29
bArray wrote: post #26

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.

It's super weird how unusual activity done by humans is correlated with dense human population centers.

I cannot conceive of a reason why that would occur

https://xkcd.com/1138/

Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus

#66

Post by crote »

crystaln wrote: post #25
ajross wrote: post #21

Earlier 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.

Absolutely not. Why would they spend a significant amount of time and effort engineering a special mode which is far more complicated, less secure, and will rarely be used?

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?

Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus

#67

Post by Spooky23 »

billy99k wrote: post #63

[flagged]

Was it? What does “near the UN” really mean?

My guess is they did some sort of sweep in advance of the president’s visit and the secret service decided, probably rashly, to do something about it instead of ignore it.

The NY Post, dipshits that they are, broke the story and were the headliner on Drudge Report. They spun/blew up the story as being potentially the biggest telecom disruption since 9/11.

Bullshit experts weighed in that only the Chinese, Russians or Israelis could possibly buy SIM cards. That’s how you know it’s bullshit, as outcomes of counterintelligence investigations that make the security services look dumb don’t get headline billing.

The other news outlets went with a slightly less unhinged variant of the story.

Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus

#68

Post by alansammarone »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #64
alansammarone wrote: post #41

I felt slightly...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, presenti…

The novel information in this article (confirmed by some technical experts on other platforms) is that this kind of SMS scam relay is a well-known sort of enterprise. I wasn’t aware of this, although it doesn’t surprise me. Once you have that context, the rest of the NYT article kind of falls apart by itself.

Ok, that makes sense. I couldn't quite fish that out of the article (there's a lot more being said that obscures it), but you're right. If this is indeed relatively common (at this scale and/or level of sophistication), then that definitely would make it much more likely that this is a PR stunt. Not completely settled, but much more likely.

Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus

#70

Post by WmWsjA6B29B4nfk »

JdeBP wrote: post #19
PLenz wrote: post #11

I mean yeah, it was kinda obvious that they busted an ad fraud sim farm but needed to pad that resume for the bosses. There's no glory in "just" fighting fraud right now.

Ironically, the Secret Service's PR people missed a trick with the press release. They could have painted this in a way that strongly resonated with people. 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…

Is it within their jurisdiction though? "National security threat targeting foreign leaders and the UN" clearly is, but just fighting scammers and fraud is local LEA or FBI job
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