Secret Service dismantles telecom threat capable of crippling cell service in NY

gnabgib 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Discussion (264 points, 13 hours ago, 263 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45345514

The whole "crippling cell service" thing ... it doesn't seem like it was the plan or intent based on what they found. Seemed like just a setup for scam calls and someone decided to make some threats (maybe a customer of theirs) and then they got caught.

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ggm 13 hours ago | parent [-]

from the news report I could believe it's both a state actor, and primarily designed for fraud, but I do also believe there's an attack risk in simultaneous cell flooding. How much that magnifies into a real risk I don't know. Sports venues routinely call in mobile microcell vans in S.E.Asia (I've seen them in Taipei) to backfill when 10,000+ people want to ring mum from one location. So there's some capacity-risk issue with simultaneous use.

I also think that basic heat-maps of L2 signal strength and seen IMSI would have been a very strong clue something was up. If you put the city overlay into a GIS and heatmap the cell towers and binding states, you'd be going "hmm for a 10 household building, with 1000 simultaneous cell connects.. WCGW"

What if e.g. flooding the 5G/4G state forced people on roaming profiles to use weaker protections in a 2G space?

	▲	duxup 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I feel like if the intent is to do that thing you wait for your moment and do it. Rather I think it’s just a scam site that was careless and maybe rented some time to someone who made some threats.