"While close to 150 world leaders prepared to descend on Manhattan for the U.N. General Assembly, the U.S. Secret Service was quietly dismantling a massive hidden telecom network across the New York area - a system investigators say could have crippled cell towers, jammed 911 calls and flooded networks with chaos at the very moment the city was most vulnerable."
"The cache, made up of more than 300 SIM servers packed with over 100,000 SIM cards and clustered within 35 miles of the United Nations, represents one of the most sweeping communications threats uncovered on U.S. soil. Investigators warn the system could have blacked out cellular service in a city that relies on it not only for daily life but for emergency response and counterterrorism."
""It can't be understated what this system is capable of doing," said Matt McCool, the special agent in charge of the Secret Service's New York field office. "It can take down cell towers, so then no longer can people communicate, right? .... You can't text message, you can't use your cell phone. And if you coupled that with some sort of other event associated with UNGA, you know, use your imagination there, it could be catastrophic to the city.""
The U.S. Secret Service dismantled a hidden telecom network spread across the New York area while world leaders were in Manhattan for the U.N. General Assembly. The cache contained more than 300 SIM servers with over 100,000 SIM cards clustered within 35 miles of the United Nations. The system could have blacked out cellular service, jammed 911 calls, and flooded networks, jeopardizing daily life, emergency response, and counterterrorism. The servers functioned like banks of mock cellphones capable of generating mass calls and texts, overwhelming local networks, and masking encrypted communications. The takedown highlights risks to urban communications infrastructure.
Read at PBS News
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