The U.S. Secret Service announces on Sep 23rd that the law enforcement agency had dismantled a network of electronic devices, SIM Card farms, located in New York tristate area. These devices were typically used by cybercriminals to flood phones with spam calls and texts.
More than 300 co-located SIM servers and 100,000 SIM cards across multiple sites, were discovered. The agency announced that these types of devices were used to conduct multiple telecommunications-related threats directed towards senior U.S. government officials.
The Secret Service warned that the sophisticated, well-funded operation could have been run by a nation-state actor. The farm was capable of sending 30 million text messages per minute and was located within miles of the United Nations.
“The potential for disruption to our country’s telecommunications posed by this network of devices cannot be overstated,” said U.S. Secret Service Director Sean Curran. “The U.S. Secret Service’s protective mission is all about prevention, and this investigation makes it clear to potential bad actors that imminent threats to our protectees will be immediately investigated, tracked down and dismantled.”
What is a SIM Card farm
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A SIM card farm is a collection of hardware devices, often called SIM boxes or SIM banks. The devices use Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology to send and receive bulk text messages and calls.
While the technology was initially developed for legitimate purposes, such as low-cost international calls, it is now primarily used for large-scale fraudulent activities such as Mass-scale phishing, Robocalling campaigns, Network disruption, Secure messaging, Spoofing, and SIM swapping.
What is it for
The investigation is still ongoing and the agency did not disclose what exactly these SIM card farms are intended for. Despite speculation that suggests foreign governments may be behind this, cybersecurity professional believe it is more likely that the operation’s central focus was scams and other profit-motivated
According to reports by Wired, the presence of “clean, tidy racks” of equipment in a brightly lit room suggests that the operation is both well-organized and professional, according to Cathal Mc Daid, VP of technology at the telecommunications and cybersecurity company Enea. Photographs released by the Secret Service display several racks of telecom devices arranged neatly, with each piece of equipment clearly numbered and labeled. Cables are also carefully managed, with tape used to secure them on the floor. Mc Daid notes that each SIM box appears to contain about 256 ports and corresponding modems. “This setup looks more professional than many other SIM farms I’ve seen,” he comments.
A source within the telecom industry further observes that the images of SIM servers and boxes shared by the Secret Service point to a “really organized” criminal enterprise. “This suggests there is significant intelligence and considerable resources behind it,” the source adds.
According to Coon from Unit 221b, a cybersecurity firm, the SIM farm uncovered by the Secret Service is not the largest he has encountered in the United States, but it is the most densely concentrated within a small geographic area. He points out that SIM boxes are illegal in the US, and the hundreds discovered in the Secret Service’s investigation must have been smuggled into the country. In one case he worked on, the boxes were brought in from China, disguised as audio amplifiers.
The use of SIM farms, even at the scale found in the New York case, is not a new phenomenon. Cybercriminals have long relied on large collections of centrally managed SIM cards for activities such as sending spam, conducting swatting attacks, creating fake accounts, and generating fraudulent engagement on social media or advertising platforms. These SIM cards are typically stored in SIM boxes, each capable of managing over a hundred cards at once, and connected to servers that can control thousands of SIMs simultaneously.
SIM farms enable “bulk messaging at a speed and volume that would be impossible for an individual user,” according to a telecom industry insider who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the Secret Service’s investigation. “The technology behind these farms is highly adaptable—SIMs can be rotated to evade detection systems, traffic can be masked to appear as if it originates from different locations, and accounts can be made to look like they belong to real users.”
