Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
100,000 sim cards... Trying to wrap my brain around that one.
The cheapest cell phone plan is, what? $30 a month? So $3 million just to establish service?
How does that even work? If it all went through one carrier, that would look even more sus, so they must have done the math with x% on major carriers and y% on MVNOs or something.
But why bother with sims when you can send texts from email accounts? 🤔
you don't put these SIMs in phones, these go into dedicated devices with very limited functions that pretend to look like phones to operator, dozens per. it can work like a proxy with massive number of outputs
stuff like this https://www.vice.com/en/article/video-ukraine-busts-alleged-russian-bot-farm-using-thousands-of-sim-cards/
also, presumably lots of these cards got burned quite fast, so not all were active at the same time, and some were spares
First of all, I imagine the budget for state-sponsored espionage and interference is quite high. They may have also not been tied to your typical postpaid plan through a major carrier. You can get prepaid lines and different types of service, such as for IoT devices. These may be a couple bucks per month and are meant to send messages and generally small amounts of data for decea such as SmartThings trackers.
Edit to add: but yeah, 100k SIM cards does seem like a lot. They could probably create havoc on the local cell towers.
The limit on the radio side is vastly different than the one on handling incoming sms for a telco. Saturation on the radio side is relatively easy to achieve. To a large extent without fully active SIM cards or with super cheap ones like m2m cards.