The Secret Service has dismantled a network of sophisticated devices in the New York area that posed a serious threat to officials ahead of a UN General Assembly meeting this week.
The devices were ‘concentrated’ within a 35-mile radius of the meeting today, where US president Donald Trump is due to deliver a speech.
Early analysis has found these cellular communications were between ‘nation-state threat actors and individuals known to federal law enforcement’.
More than 300 SIM servers and 100,000 SIM cards were seized to stop the imminent threat to protective operations. One network was said to be capable of sending 30,000,000 texts per minute.
International security expert Will Geddes told Metro he believes the planned attack was likely a distributed denial of service, or DDOS.
What could have happened?
‘A DDOS is a means of clogging the network so sufficiently that literally none of the cell phones would be able to work,’ Geddes explained.
‘If you take out the network, that removes the ability for individuals to call under duress, for a fire, a crime, or anything. It disrupts the general public’s communications to the emergency services, and that includes the police.
‘Police do run their own radio network to communicate with each other, but with a DDOS, people wouldn’t be able to report any of the emergencies, which could cause chaos in itself.
‘If there are state threat actors behind it, who could then either attack somewhere, set off devices, or set off decoys to draw emergency services into areas unnecessarily.
‘This would cause untoward chaos.’
Who was the threat from, and why?
The hardware was being used to ‘conduct multiple telecommunications-related threats directed towards senior U.S. government officials’.
Mr Geddes told Metro he believes the foreign-state actor behind this is one of the three ‘usual suspects’: Russia, China, or Iran.
Mr Geddes did say he doesn’t think Israel is behind the plot: ‘I can’t see Israel doing an operation like this on a friendly state. Israel is too reliant on the United States as a partner.’
‘In terms of the skill sets to be able to do this, it’s not massively complicated – it’s like using a bot farm to attack an internet service provider or to do a DDOS attack on a website that hackers might do,’ he added.
‘DDOS attacks are quite common, but this sort of overloading of data and cell phone signals could have been quite catastrophic.
‘The UN Assembly is somewhat isolated on the waterside. So, taking out that side of Manhattan, it would be the same as what happened after 9/11, when all cell phone communications went down.’
Mr Geddes speculated that the actor behind this attempt was likely timing it for when the event was commencing, as an ‘isolating tactic’ – or, a precursor to a larger attack.
‘There’s a good chance it was either targeting this particular assembly meeting/or it was going to be a run-up, a rehearsal, which I doubt. It appears to be the first sort of ‘domino’ to fall,’ he added.
‘This is not a brand new method of attack, but it’s a really, really concerning one.’
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