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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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

Why?

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.

I work directly with telcos. All text messages, calls, etc go through telco systems that are in data centers far from the towers. There is no benefit for one cell phone being geographically close to another to send spam messages.

No, that’s not a thing.

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?

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