Topline
The Secret Service, the agency in charge of security for the United Nations General Assembly, discovered a threatening network of over 300 servers and 10,000 SIM cards across the New York tri-state area capable of facilitating anonymous communications, disrupting cell towers, and shutting down the city’s cellular network.
The network could have “disabled cell phone towers and potentially shut down the cellular network in New York City,” Matt McCool, the special agent in charge of the Secret Service’s New York field office.
The network could also facilitate dedicated domain of service attacks, which shut down servers with Internet traffic, and could send up to 30 million text messages per minute, McCool told the Associated Press.
All of the devices were found within 35 miles of the United Nations headquarters in Midtown Manhattan.
The Secret Service moved quickly to dismantle the network, which no longer poses a threat to the New York City area, McCool said.
The investigation into the devices is ongoing, the Secret Service said, but early forensic analysis indicates it was used for communications between “foreign actors” and people already known to federal law enforcement.
No arrests have been announced, and investigators are still searching through the equivalent of 1,000 cell phones worth of data.
This is a breaking story and will be updated.