Ukraine seizes 150k SIM cards from bot farm | Hacker News Reader

Ukraine seizes 150k SIM cards from bot farm

bleepingcomputer.com

14 pointsaxus6 comments

Somewhat interesting, since the number of active sims is actually a kind of standard way of estimating population in an area assuming no census.

If you are able to get an accurate estimation of how many sim cards a person has(via some sort of sampling), then you simply query the telcos for active sims and can get something decently accurate.

Wonder if it affects current Ukraine pop estimates.

...And people wonder why I scream and holler about the fact that by allowing public opinion to equate SIM number or IMEI with a person, Telcos are essentially an outsourced tracking db for a government of their citizenry, and there is nothing short of force of law or constitution that will ever break that for all intents and purposes.

Mostly in the video, interesting images of the hardware of such an underground operation "at scale". And numbers in the article. Not exactly subtle, but then it's one that got caught. That's a lot of antennas in one place :-)

Seems kinda weird. If you'd run such a farm, targeting a specific country, seems very stupid to do these kinds of attacks from that very country.

If messages are purported to be from a country's residents, it helps if they can be (eventually) traced to antennas there. That sounds fair to me. What seems surprising is to have so many in one place. And/or to have desks and manual operations (SIM cards) at that same location. I would have expected fewer antennas at once and unattended operation.

Except if this was next to a mall or large train station or something that might cover for the density of "phones".

There are ways to detect proximity to infrastructure and proxies... it's a lot easier/cheaper to just have boxes with like 50 LTE modems and pay someone some money to switch out sims once a day/week/whenever.

In other countries, SIM cards and mobile internet is stupid cheap.

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