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Comment by bArray | Hacker News Reader

If the objective is to knock out cell towers, just jam them. It's clearly a SIM farm for middle-man communications. It just happened to be close to where the UN were.

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Close being 35km.

I think it's 35 miles (X 1.6).

Also "most of them" within 35 miles (~50 km).

So anywhere in NYC but it must be targeting the UN /s.

Also funny was that it was considered espionage at first ... but they found lots of drugs on site -- clearly not espionage.

They found 50g of cocaine, which is more than a personal (not Scarface) use amount of cocaine, but more on the scale of a single dealer. Like the guy running the sim farm was also selling coke on the side.

The World Trade Center is/was closer to UNHQ ;)

Edit:ascii emoji fail

It's super weird how unusual activity done by humans is correlated with dense human population centers.

I cannot conceive of a reason why that would occur

https://xkcd.com/1138/

Also hard to imagine how this could be used for espionage. Listening in on cell traffic requires defeating security measures in the protocol. Generally something like a 0 day. This might require a single SIM card, but probably not lots of unless there’s something very unusual about the vulnerability that requires lots of valid seeming actors on the network. Plausible I suppose. But “SMS spam” is a vastly more likely explanation than a security hole that can’t be brute forced on the radio.

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