> Officials said the anonymous communications network, which included more than 100,000 SIM cards and 300 servers, could interfere with emergency response services and could be used to conduct encrypted communication. One official said the network was capable of sending 30 million text messages per minute, anonymously. The official said the agency had never before seen such an extensive operation.

> Investigators found the SIM cards and servers in August at several locations within a 35-mile radius of the United Nations headquarters. The discovery followed a monthslong investigation into what the agency described as anonymous “telephonic threats” made to three high-level U.S. government officials this spring — one official in the Secret Service and two who work at the White House, one of the officials said.

So 100k SIM cards scattered around the middle of New York City.

Probably an egress point for scammers and bot farms, and the speculation about local disruptions isn't grounded in anything other than scale?

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fiprisoner 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>Probably an egress point for scammers and bot farms, and the speculation about local disruptions isn't grounded in anything other than scale?

More likely an egress point for cheap VOIP routing.

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MrMorden 3 hours ago | parent [-]

That would be my first guess if the devices were found in the Middle East, but legitimate interconnect in the US is stupid cheap. (See e.g. Twilio's SIP pricing; I assume they have reasonable supply chain security.)

	▲	2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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bflesch 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Maybe some sort of darknet service for anonymous sms / calls which was used for stuff that really raised alarms such as calling/messaging these officials

	▲	t-3 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Another article about the same event mentioned swatting against public officials but wasn't clear on whether or not that was how they found these.

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chedabob 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah there was this the other day, although I'd expect the hardware for this is much smaller than is shown in the photos in the OP: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45294766

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cootsnuck 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Nah it's that size. You need an individual modem for each SIM card because you need a unique IMEI. It's possible each of those SIMs are eUICCs as well which means basically that each card is like a "wallet" with multiple profiles.

I've used hardware a decent amount larger than what's pictured in the OP for work. But what I was using wasn't just for SMS. So I needed more sophisticated modems. What they're using looks like a bunch of 64 port modem banks exclusively for SMS.

(Oh wait if you mean the devices for what's in the article you linked, then yea, those I'm sure are much smaller and quite different.)

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foobarian 5 hours ago | parent [-]

What kinds of things do these devices get used for in legit enterprises? If you're able to say :-)

	▲	toast0 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I used to send a lot of SMS verification codes. We considered setting up a SIM box, but never did. You get different SMS routing from a phone on a major network than you do from the SMS aggregators, and that could be useful for getting codes to difficult destinations. But we had enough volume that we could typically get improvements on routing by asking aggregators about difficult destinations (unless the difficulty was coming intentionally from the destination carrier). The aggregators do sometimes use grey routes from SIM farms. Squishyness around terms of use and accounting would have been an issue too, we would not have been able to fly under the radar on 'unlimited messaging' Another potential use could be if you needed to send a lot of alerts to your employees/customers in a short period. Most aggregators have rate limits, and so do carriers... if you're a big customer, you can probably get limits raised; if you only have an occasional need, you might prefer to have a large number of low cost SIMs.