this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2025
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I'm uncertain about the whole thing now. The pictures of the equipment were certainly large scale enough that it had some sort of financial backing but the implications that they could "shut down every phone in x distance" claims are a bit rich. That's implying they could flawlessly execute scripts on everyone's wild hardware and firmware etc.
It's interesting from a cyber security perspective but these days I'm just worried how someone stupid will spin this and suddenly we're not allowed to have privacy anymore.
Edit: ig damaging tower digital infrastructure could be possible but a setup that expensive isn't being done without looking for a profit or informational benefit I think.
I thought it was more of a denial of service attack by flooding nearby towers with SIM registration requests causing the infrastructure not to be able to handle other calls, or something along those lines.
It's like those stories about "we seized enough fentanyl to kill 1,000 people." Sure, maybe that's true but that's not what they were going to do with the fentanyl.
Used in a certain way you use those sims to shut down cell towers, but there's not much money in that, and there is in sms scams