"Due to the sheer scale of the infrastructure of this single SIM farm-and the fact that it reportedly came onto the Secret Service's radar after it was exploited in "swatting" attacks that targeted US members of Congress around Christmas of 2023-the agency has warned that the operation, which has been at least partially dismantled, posed a serious threat of a disruptive attack on cellular service."
"The recent discovery of a sprawling SIM farm operation in the New York City area has revealed how these facilities, typically used by cybercriminals to flood phones with spam calls and texts, have grown large enough that the US government is warning it could have been used not just for crime, but large-scale disruption of critical infrastructure."
Secret Service investigators located facilities across the New York tristate area that contained more than 100,000 SIM cards installed in SIM servers for centralized management. The operation reportedly involved about 300 servers and was linked to swatting attacks targeting members of Congress around Christmas 2023. Law enforcement warned that the infrastructure could overwhelm cell towers, send roughly 30 million text messages per minute, and potentially disable cell phone towers, threatening to shut down the cellular network in New York City. Operators used the farm to flood phones with spam calls and texts. Parts of the operation have been partially dismantled.
Read at WIRED
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