this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2025
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SIM city: Feds say 100,000-card farms could have killed cell towers in NYC (www.theregister.com)
submitted 5 days ago by throws_lemy@reddthat.com to c/tech@programming.dev
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The US Secret Service has dismantled a network of SIM farms in and around New York City it claims was behind multiple incidents targeting senior government officials and had enough power to disrupt entire cellular networks.

The network – or at least the parts the Secret Service has discovered – was massive, consisting of more than 300 colocated SIM servers, controlling more than 100,000 SIM cards, set up at multiple locations. All of the facilities the Secret Service discovered were located throughout the New York Tri-state area (NY, New Jersey, and Connecticut) but all within 35 miles of the UN headquarters building in NYC.

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[–] wetbeardhairs@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 points 5 days ago (7 children)

OK so what does one of those rackmount cellphone arrays do and how does it target people? I could see it turning on all of the modems simultaneously and overwhelming a network. But I can't figure out what it does to an individual besides a denial of service.

[–] scintilla@crust.piefed.social 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Maybe you could have them all message a single individual? I've never received 100s of messages a second from multiple numbers but it doesn't really sound that distructive since blocking numbers is so easy.

[–] wetbeardhairs@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 5 days ago

Even if they were to send endless messages to an individual number, I don't think it would cause any form of destruction or danger. It would just be denial of service. The cellphone backend might even put that number in a penalty box and refuse its connection. Again, just a denial of service.

I'm thinking the article is full of shit.

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