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This guy claims that it's not that suspicious and not a state-backed operation. https://x.com/ErrataRob/status/1970586083374112784 https://x.com/ErrataRob/stat
by neuroelectron 1y ago
This guy claims that it's not that suspicious and not a state-backed operation.
https://x.com/ErrataRob/status/1970586083374112784 https://x.com/ErrataRob/status/1970586083374112784
- is_true 1y agoI thought it was someone running a mobile ip proxy
- dilyevsky 1y ago"residential" proxies, ad clickbots, instagram/twitter bots - lots of "legit" use-cases these days
- codedokode 1y agoAd clickbots are a win-win though? Make ad less profitable.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- AnotherGoodName 1y agoCan’t read it since I don’t have a login there but i’m guessing they buy sims from all over the country and sms on matching prefixes since people will assume a local number is less likely to be spam. This explains using such a bank. You want to cover as many prefixes as possible and you can’t match area codes with traditional sms services.
- motoboi 1y agoYou don't need a login to read a single tweet.
- AnotherGoodName 1y agoThanks! I was assuming it was a chain with more details than i saw there.
- edoceo 1y agoTwitter is inconsistent for me. From the mobile (FF, not authenticated) it's blocked but from desktop (FF, not authenticated) is visible.
- therein 1y agoWith Google referrer, it loads even more often, even on mobile I believe. Same for LinkedIn. It will not authwall you if you're coming from Google.
- jghn 1y agoYou can also see his takes on bsky [1] or h blog he posted there [2] [1] https://bsky.app/profile/erratarob.bsky.social https://bsky.app/profile/erratarob.bsky.social [2] https://cybersect.substack.com/p/that-secret-service-sim-farm-story https://cybersect.substack.com/p/that-secret-service-sim-far...
- AnotherGoodName 1y agoThe second link there is much more meaningful. I actually did see the tweet in full it turns out. It's just that there's not much content so i figured "oh it's one of those twitter thread chains i can't read".
- jghn 1y agoFWIW I have found him to be a good follow over the years. Unfortunately he mostly only posts on Twitter & not Bsky so I only see his stuff when he crosses over to bsky.
- therein 1y agoGood post, also they use Quectel because it allows changing IMEI with a single AT command.
- perching_aix 1y agoThese days the way to go is social media proxies. A popular one is xcancel. Just replace the x in the domain with xcancel and you'll land on a proxy site (somebody's Nitter instance to be specific): https://xcancel.com/ErrataRob/status/1970586083374112784 https://xcancel.com/ErrataRob/status/1970586083374112784 Still not gonna help if you have cookies disabled because of the rate limiting, but hey.
- dmd 1y agoI love how spammers do that- it works out great for me. I no longer live in my phones area code. I block the entire area code, which catches a huge amount of spam calls.
- IG_Semmelweiss 1y agothis is a required hack, for any founder SO much value in being able to root out garbage sales calls
- esseph 1y agoYou don't even need to be a founder, just a person in a position that people may believe is responsible for buying products and signing checks at a company.
- brookst 1y agoWith marginal cost of spam being $0, I am pretty sure homeless people and Bill Gates get exactly the same amount of spam. I’d be surprised if there was any target selection.
- trod1234 1y agoAlso need to do something about the inherent insecurity of most phones. GrapheneOS being a pretty decent solution nowadays to control those errant radio signals won't help against profiling for your next oil change/maintenance with those TPMS sensors beaconing everywhere you go.
- justahuman74 1y ago> since people will assume a local number is less likely to be spam. Local number has become an spam signifier for me
- VoidWhisperer 1y agoThe funny thing for me is that I still have the phone number I had when I was growing up, which is for a state halfway across the US. Most of my spam calls are in the area code of my phone number, making them pretty easy to recognize since I dont really know anyone from that area code anymore
- ljf 1y agoThings I learnt today: that mobile phone numbers in the USA are 'local' Here in the UK, all landline residential numbers start with an area code that starts 02 for London and 01 for the rest of the coountry (eg 020 for London and 0114 for Sheffield). Mobile numbers here all start 07 here, and the first 5 digits are carrier specific - but so many people port their numbers that it becomes meaningless pretty quickly. But years ago you could spot a number an know what provider the caller was on. --- Are residential and mobile numbers similar in the States?
- petesergeant 1y agoAlso traditionally American cellphone users pay to receive calls, which will blow the mind of a Britisher.
- rkomorn 1y agoAnd text messages. It was very shocking to me how many minutes cell phone plans had in the US when I moved there (it was ... a while ago) compared to France. But also: in the US, calling someone on their cell cost the same as calling someone on a land line. In France, calling someone on their cell from a land line was something like 4x more per minute. Really, the structure of phone costs (both land and cell) in the US was quite different.
- hdgvhicv 1y agoIn the 90s local calls and thus Internet was free in America, where in the U.K. it cost upto £5 an hour (in today’s money) to be online.
- rkomorn 1y agoYep. France was similar to the UK. I spent years online between 10pm and 6am to use our dialup at the off-hours cost (which wasn't free, but significantly cheaper). Not the good old days of spending money to browse the internet at 28.8kbps.
- 1y ago
- LargoLasskhyfv 1y agoIf for some reason your browsing environment isn't/can't be configured to circumvent login shenanigans, at least for now, xitter can be read by inserting cancel right behind the X-part of the URL. Like so: https://xcancel.com/ErrataRob/status/1970586083374112784 https://xcancel.com/ErrataRob/status/1970586083374112784 With the additional advantage of giving you a view more like threadreader.app, or something. Without having to install anything.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago"Can't read it since I don't have a login there..." https://nitter.poast.org/ErrataRob/ https://nitter.poast.org/ErrataRob/
- billy99k 1y ago[flagged]
- lovich 1y ago> This story is nonsense. > It's just normal criminal enterprise for sending SMS spam and anonymous messages. Somebody used this service to send SMS threats to some politicians, so the Secret Service traced it back here. They are describing it as some special political threat ("35 mile radius from the UN") when it's just perfectly normal criminal enterprise. > We know it's a crap story because to the way the New York Times story on this cites anonymous sources in the administration, and then James A. Lewis to confirm it. This guy, formerly of the CSIS think tank, is the the NYTimes regularly trots out to confirm cybersecurity claims by anonymous government officials. > Ir's just normal crime folks, there's absolutely none of the threats here that they claim. Why did you put quote marks around the word “legitimate”, like he said the word in his post?
- boomboomsubban 1y ago>Why did you put quote marks around the word “legitimate”, like he said the word in his post? They do say that in the associated blog post, though they don't seem to think it's likely to be legitimate. https://cybersect.substack.com/p/that-secret-service-sim-farm-story https://cybersect.substack.com/p/that-secret-service-sim-far...
- firesteelrain 1y agoIt does note via screenshot at bottom that these devices are often seen in Russia. Not sure what that means
- mike_d 1y agoI am very familiar with the hardware being used in that operation and Rob is 100% correct. Someone used an online SMS service to send threatening messages to a member of the Gleichschaltung squad, and the secret service traced the SIM card back to one of these rented apartments. The reason it was linked to a "Chinese state sponsored blah blah blah" is because most Chinese criminal operations in the US have some indirect benefit to the Chinese government, which is why they are allowed to operate. You could use this hardware to launch some sort of a flooding attack, but given the density all you are going to knock out is the one cell site all your devices are talking to. If China wanted to knock out cell service around the UN they would use the hundreds of thousands of backdoored Android phones in New York to launch a more distributed attack.
- JackFr 1y agoI not familiar with any of it, so I’m willing to take your word, but doesn’t the scope raise some eyebrows? Using the prices quoted in TFA they’re talking about $900,000 in servers and another $500,000 in SIM cards, before labor, rent and electricity. Is that sort of outlay typical for phone scammers. Also on a technical note is there an advantage to having all your sites in the NYC area? Is it simply that there’s enough cell traffic, the bad actors illicit traffic won’t stand out?
- rootsudo 1y agoNo way, whatever the sim hardware cost is and the sim service per month for the carrier. NYC is just high density, remember cell means cellular so the towers are configured for high traffic and more fall back, also being easy to go around in general, airports etc Esims go for $5-10 a month. Hardware is less than 20k max. Apartment and general utilities are a sunk cost.
- VectorLock 1y agoEach one of those units is probably ~$6k for the device and sim cards. I don't think there were that many of them in the pictures to add up to $900k.
- d--b 1y agoYeah thanks, that makes more sense. The devices probably are in New York because of the high antenna density which makes it easier to actually not jam the cell towers. The secret service spun it as a terror threat in the same way your orthopedist tells you your teeth problem comes from bad posture. I mean, the thing might be used to jam the networks (one would have to check that the devices still work when using all the antennas simultaneously), but that really sounds like an awful lot of effort for a disruption that’s neither guaranteed nor that distuptive. I mean, this would create some chaos for sure, but law enforcement and emergency services use radio to communicate. 99% of businessses use wired phones. So this would mostly affect what? deliveries? A large scale spam operation is way more plaisible. That the secret service is directly under Trump may also explain why they spun it as potential terrorism stuff. it’s part of their effort to make people believe that America is under terror threat, so that they can legitimize power grabbing…
- leric 1y ago[dead]
- romperstomper 1y agoAn interesting choosing of words - "It's just normal criminal enterprise for sending SMS spam and anonymous messages." It doesn't look anyway "normal" as for me. I feel that this guy just says me "move along, nothing to see here" and resembles some South Park absurdity tbh. As for me it looks quite advanced (though I'm not an expert here) for just sending spam messages.
- netsharc 1y agoYou admit to not knowing what tech these criminals have, and then on the basis of that you conclude "it doesn't look normal to me".. It's like landing in Saudi Arabia and saying, "All the women here wear head covering, that doesn't look normal to me"... Meanwhile on the flipside the authorities hype it up to be some state-sponsored threat, as if to say "Look citizen, your very competent government is keeping you safe! Trust us!"
- romperstomper 1y agoWell.. my judgment was based on the facts from the article, which are mostly about the amount and sophistication of equipment. I also read more facts from this link posted there as a reference https://apnews.com/article/unga-threat-telecom-service-sim-93734f76578bc9ca22d93a8e91fd9c76 https://apnews.com/article/unga-threat-telecom-service-sim-9... - they mention 300 SIM servers and 100K SIM cards which is quite impressive as for me. Also, for some reasons all of this is clustered around the UN facilities (in 35 miles radius). Even if all of this is related to spam only activities this is quite a large investment as for me and that's why I'm not really convinced this is just some "normal" thing to see.
- neuroelectron 1y agoI think $1 million in basically abandoned, anonymized equipment is clearly not normal.
- tosapple 1y agoI believe that's rob from blog.erratasec.com. The site may be being hugged to death currently i can see posts on ddg but it can't be reached.