Secret Service agents disrupted a telecommunications operation that could have shut down cell service around the United Nations and the wider New York City region as the General Assembly opened.
Hardware confiscated by the Secret Service was within 35 miles of New York City, according to Fox News.
The Secret Service said it “dismantled a network of electronic devices located throughout the New York tristate area that were used to conduct multiple telecommunications-related threats directed towards senior U.S. government officials.”
“This protective intelligence investigation led to the discovery of more than 300 co-located SIM servers and 100,000 SIM cards across multiple sites,” the Secret Service said in a statement.
“In addition to carrying out anonymous telephonic threats, these devices could be used to conduct a wide range of telecommunications attacks,” the statement said.
“This includes disabling cell phone towers, enabling denial of services attacks and facilitating anonymous, encrypted communication between potential threat actors and criminal enterprises,” the agency added.
Secret Service Director Sean Curran remarked that “the potential for disruption to our country’s telecommunications posed by this network of devices cannot be overstated.”
An official CBS did not name said the network “could text message the entire country within 12 minutes.”
One unnamed official said the illicit network of devices could send up to 30 million anonymous text messages per minute, far beyond anything else ever discovered, according to The New York Times.
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“It can take down cell towers, so then no longer can people communicate, right? … You can’t text message, you can’t use your cellphone,” Matt McCool, special agent in charge of the Secret Service’s New York field office, said, according to the New York Post.
“And if you coupled that with some sort of other event associated with UNGA, you know, use your imagination there, it could be catastrophic to the city,” he said, referring to the United Nations General Assembly, where President Donald Trump will speak Tuesday.
“We will continue working toward identifying those responsible and their intent, including whether their plan was to disrupt the U.N. General Assembly and communications of government and emergency personnel during the official visit of world leaders in and around New York City,” McCool said in a statement, according to The New York Times.
“This network had the potential to disable cellphone towers and essentially shut down the cellular network,” McCool said.
Agencies had already started an investigation into what officials called anonymous “telephonic threats” made to three high-level government officials, including two in the White House and one in the Secret Service.
“This is an ongoing investigation, but there’s absolutely no reason to believe we won’t find more of these devices in other cities,” McCool said.
“My instinct is this is espionage,” Anthony Ferrante, the global head of cybersecurity at FTI, an international consulting firm, said.
James A. Lewis, a cybersecurity researcher at the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington, said Russia and China are on the short list of nations that could pull together such a sophisticated operation.
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