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Comment by hk1337

5 months ago

Both scenarios could be right?

It could be just a scam bot farm but a scam bot farm with the intention of targeting vulnerable UN delegates with scams not necessarily to disrupt any cell tower?

15 comments

hk1337

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JdeBP  5 months ago

The whole U.N. thing is nonsense for several reasons, many of which got discussed just yesterday at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45345514 .

If one is setting up to target the U.N. one does not need this sort of setup to do so. Grand Central Station and the Chrysler Building are just as (in)valid a guess at some purported central target, which one does not have to enclose. The 35 mile radius is ludicrous, and very probably a "telephone game" garbling by PR people of the rough range of SMS to a 2G cell tower given certain conditions. And targetting just a few delegates for scams, with kit that costs thousands of quid per gateway box, is stupidity. The scams thrive on large volumes because they don't net 100% of the marks.

This is a way of having VOIP on one side and what will appear to callees like (doing some simple arithmetic based upon the various photographs) a few hundred (in the site where they're on the floor) to several thousand (in the site where they're on garage shelving along the wall) seemingly legitimate cell phones in multiple locations on the other side. The far more sensible hypotheses are an (overseas) scam support operation, or a dodgy telco operator of some kind.

ajross  5 months ago

Why would you need to target "vulnerable UN delegates" from blocks away from the UN, though? Literally anywhere in the US would do. It's literally SMS, the location of the transmitter says nothing about the location of the recipient.

No, they put this in lower manhattan because of the cell density there. It makes the fraud harder to detect in all the noise of normal usage.

  • thehappypm  5 months ago

    This farm isn’t anywhere near the UN, though—35 miles away. Which could put it in westchester, connecticut, new jersey, long island..

  • crystaln  5 months ago

    I believe if you connect directly to the tower a phone is connected to you can bypass central spam filters.

    • crote  5 months ago

      Absolutely not. Why would they spend a significant amount of time and effort engineering a special mode which is far more complicated, less secure, and will rarely be used?

      And how is it even supposed to work? How are you going to handle billing? Does a cell phone tower even know the phone number of the connected devices? What's going to happen when the recipient disconnects mid-SMS? What happens when the same number is in use by multiple SIM cards?

    • pkaeding  5 months ago

      This is interesting. Can you explain? What leads you to believe that? Do you have any references, or is this your area of expertise?

      Cell networks are not my area of expertise, but cybersecurity is, so I am genuinely interested to learn more.

      1 reply →

robomc  5 months ago

You're right, it could be the sensible most likely thing AND the far-fetched thing.

  • alansammarone  5 months ago

    You're assuming the conclusion in order to argue against it. It's slightly surprising to me that this is not obvious and actually, pretty common. You can't argue against X ("It isn't completely obvious that is bogus") by assuming X ("far-fetched thing").

    I don't mean this in derogatory sense. I wasslightly...hm...confused when reading this. When I see something in the news, to the degree that I trust the source, I see it only as a statement of fact, and unless I trust the commentator, I ignore the comment. I only expect descriptive accuracy from the news. This sometimes requires resources that individuals don't generally have.

    When I read a personal blog article articulating a personal opinion, presenting evidence and trying to make a case for their conclusion, I usually apply a different standard. From them, I expect sound reasoning, which often requires a form of independence/neutrality that news organizations don't have.

    And I can't say that this article is structured as a sequence of QEDs, so to speak. It doesn't seem like the conclusions follow from the premisses. That's not to say is wrong, just that if it is right, it would be in part by accident.

bhouston  5 months ago

> the intention of targeting vulnerable UN delegates with scams not necessarily to disrupt any cell tower?

It would have been so much easier to be closer to the UNGA and then it would be more effective if that was the intent.