Cache of Devices Capable of Crashing Cell Network Is Found Near U.N
46 comments
·September 23, 2025perihelions
JdeBP
It does seem like the sort of PR-rewrite for a press release that results in distances measured in football fields.
Looking at a map, a 35 mile as-the-crow-flies (and as the cell network signal flies) radius of the U.N. Secretariat building almost gets one to Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey, in one direction and past Stamford, Connecticut, in another.
AlanYx
It's worth highlighting that that link suggests this may be linked to foreign states rather than just garden-variety organized crime ("...early analysis indicates cellular communications between nation-state threat actors...").
pyuser583
Sorry to be nitpicky, but the US Secret Service really, really prefers the acronym "USSS" over "SS."
tbrownaw
It reminds me of those "how to promote yourself" things about say turning "did routine performance optimizations on the website" into "saved the company $ZZZ million" and such.
lyu07282
The guardian too just parroting the press release. Even ChatGPT would literally do a better job to add technical context and critical analysis of that nonsense story.
wildzzz
That quote comes directly from the Secret service press release lol
tbrownaw
> 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?
bflesch
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
chedabob
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
wildzzz
Oh lol, this is a scam site. Yes, there are potential other uses for a sim box but mostly they are used for VoIP purposes. It's honestly so hard reading quotes from the US government these days. Cartels, drugs, guns. They make it sound like they interrupted the staging of an assault on the UN when the article actually says that the locations were within 35 miles of the UN headquarters in NYC. This is a significant distance as it covers beyond the 5 boroughs, it's the "tri state area". Like 20M people live in that circle. I highly doubt this is for anything other than VoIP scams.
kotaKat
Yup. This is literally just a cellular grey route site for some shitty VoIP provider, just like the SIM box SMS scams go marching on in other countries. Some operator is shitting their pants right now, probably.
The SIM cards come from cheap MVNOs that have dealer arrangements for cheap or free first month activations, then they just set up a handful of SIM boxes and a residential Internet connection back to the mothership (like they did at the captured house with the white Verizon 5G Home router just casually sitting on the floor next to the units).
Similarly, I’ve had some friends on US MVNOs themselves that have access to “free” international calling, yet every time they call (the same) international number the receiving party gets a wildly different caller ID from a wildly different country each time (Poland, Moldova, etc). Also dodgy SIM boxes!
jacquesm
So that's the tip. Makes you really wonder about the iceberg, this raises many more questions than it answers.
The UK has criminalized possessing or using SIM farms or related gear in response to these popping up with some regularity. But the operators are pretty clever and know how to hide. I've been thinking about how easy it would be to detect these when you're a telco and I think the signature is unique enough that it should be possible to detect which SIMs are part of a farm, even if you don't know the exact location of the farm.
Chance-Device
Since you seem to know about the subject, how are these not immediately found and shut down? It seems like the messages they send could be traced to the sims physical location, and having a massive cluster of thousands of sims just sitting in an apartment also seems like an obvious giveaway. And there’s all the traceability required to rent the locations and buy the equipment. It seems like bothering with this is just asking to get caught.
jacquesm
Well, they did get caught. But for that to happen immediately would require a detection method that can point out the presence of a farm with only a few samples. SIMs don't know their 'physical location' and triangulation of signals in these bands in the urban environment is non trivial.
Whoever did this likely isn't all that happy that their carefully created infra was used to harass officials, which most likely is the single reason this operation got uncovered in the first place. If it would have just been used for low level crime who knows how long they could have continued to do this.
Note that these are not unique to NYC or even to the United States, they've been found in other countries as well, the UK has now criminalized possession or operation of these (but the fines are so low that I don't think it will make much difference).
tbrownaw
> SIMs don't know their 'physical location' and triangulation of signals in these bands in the urban environment is non trivial.
IIRC modern cell towers use cool tricks to send stuff for a particular phone to only where that phone is so they can send more total data. Can this not be turned into a precomputed map by taking a test phone everywhere and seeing what settings the tower picks to talk to it?
huflungdung
[dead]
null
SanjayMehta
There was at least one SIM farm which was installed in a delivery type van and driven around. This was to avoid being detected as a stationary device.
jacquesm
Clever! Also far more risky because it would require near constant attention.
easyat
What a bizarre story. They say it's an anonymous network. What does that mean when multiple locations with racks of tens of thousands of SIM cards and the supporting equipment are found around NYC area? In order to manage this hardware and the operations around this equipment it would take boots on the ground, at least occasionally, for repairs and maintenance.
No mention of arrests or surveillance of any site to try and apprehend anyone related.
aesh2Xa1
The details are skimpy. In a CNN article we can see photos and mention that these were housed in apartment units and perhaps other rentals.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/23/us/swatting-investigation-ser...
EDIT:
While the headline on NYT highlights an attack on the towers for disruption, the CNN piece gives more weight to two other uses: (1) criminal communication network and (2) swatting.
I think those two make sense. The SIMs would probably hold US numbers and would appear authentic for accessing the US operators' networks.
jacquesm
(2) is the thing that brought attention of LE on these, and likely was a very dumb move by one of the users of this system. If just (1) they could have kept it going for much longer, (2) is what brought it down.
Retr0id
I don't see why you'd actually need any SIMs in the first place if you wanted to DoS a cell tower. My guess is that it's basically just a device farm for either sending spam or receiving activation codes for spam accounts elsewhere. By putting them in a populated area, the increase in traffic is less noticeable.
jacquesm
It makes it much harder to nail down exactly where the farm is. You can't just go break down all the doors in a large high-rise and the reflections of the radio signals in the urban canyon will further hamper your ability to pin-point the devices. But you might be able to correlate power consumption or heat signature with activity.
Loudergood
100,000 sims connecting to a cell network in Vermont will crash things. In midtown Manhattan that's a blip.
jacquesm
That much capacity could easily overwhelm things that scale poorly. 911 service for instance.
bflesch
Could be as simple as faking app downloads for the NYC area to raise the appstore ranking
trebligdivad
Yeh very weird; I mean if it was just spammers then you wouldn't bothered putting it in somewhere expensive like NY would you?
dvdkon
With that many devices, you'd need to have them in some place with very dense cell service.
mmastrac
Hopefully this is a wakeup call for anyone thinking that phone number validation is sufficient to prevent botting and fraud.
comrade1234
I'm curious how this would work without being traced. Someone is paying rent on the apartments. For the simcards, I think they are all able to call 911 even if they don't have credit/dataplan. They're also able to connect to a tower and take up slots. So probably the only way to financially trace the simcards is the initial purchase.
foobarian
I wonder if all the cards in the photo are active at once, or only activated on some rotation. The latter would certainly make them a lot harder to detect
instagib
Can also text 911 now which would overburden the texting protocol network so no one else’s texts will go through.
It’s a cell tower jammer and terrorism multiplier. Can’t call or text. It will probably disturb internet service as well. Include a few radio jammers for local police and a few satellite antennas you could create an opportunity then a panic to cover your tracks getting out.
iberator
Its relatively hard to jam modern BTS with LTE and 5G. It's part of the design. PTP with fancy modulation helps :p
jacquesm
SIM cards don't 'call 911', you can call 911 even if there is no SIM card at all, all you need is a working radio.
xrd
Are there ways to prevent this kind of thing using GrapheneOS or FLX1s?
Lots of interesting discussions about cell phone networks lately.
Fake cell phone towers ICE is using to track people:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/the-wiretap/2025/09/09/how-ice-...
GrapheneOS (de-googled android) and FLX1s (pure Linux phone):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45312326
My question is: are any of these alternatives helpful against these novel attacks? If you are on a phone using a network vanilla provider like tmobile or otherwise, is there any way to prevent your phone from trying to connect to a fake network?
If I controlled the entire cell phone stack, like I would with FLX1s, then could I have something like the ssh initial connection signature:
The authenticity of host '100.64.0.46 (100.64.0.46)' can't be established.
ED25519 key fingerprint is SHA256:yE4jh7gROroduLqbIFcInlUXrpDy8JIpJPc+XvtIpWs.
It would be a bit of a pain to accept a new cell tower when I'm in a new city, but I could imagine syncing a whitelisted trusted set of cell phone towers (ha, when I think of that the whole idea of "trusted" is laughable). But, at least I would have more insight into when I am getting surveilled. And, I could say "not today ICE!" or "tmobile, idk, please give me my HN fix, I don't even care if you know I'm aware my government is tracking me as I pay the service fee!"
theturtle
ICE is probably all "we want our stuff back!!!"
gnatman
“Cache of Devices Capable of Sending Millions of Spam Political Texts”
gubbler
[flagged]
Is there a less clickbait-y source? There's no tangible link to the United Nations described in the article; that seems to be a gratuitous flourish.
> "several locations within a 35-mile radius of the United Nations headquarters"
That's the entirety of New York City!
edit to add: This very weird part was actually lifted from the SS press release,
> "These devices were concentrated within 35 miles of the global meeting of the United Nations General Assembly now underway in New York City."
https://www.secretservice.gov/newsroom/releases/2025/09/us-s... ("U.S. Secret Service dismantles imminent telecommunications threat in New York tristate area")