The tiny chip inside your smart phone, a SIM card, is the key to connecting to your cellular network. But nefarious actors have figured out how to weaponize thousands of them in swarm attacks to spread disinformation, steal financial information, and jam entire communication networks. ScottThuman reports.

The following is a transcript of a report from “Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson.”
Watch the video by clicking the link at the end of the page.

In September, as President Trump and the first lady arrived to address the United Nations, the escalator abruptly stopped. It wasn’t the only technical glitch of the day.

President Donald Trump: These are the two things I got from the United Nations: a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter.

The president called for an investigation. At the same time, the Secret Service had already discovered a separate, wide-ranging threat that could have crippled the UN meetings and much of New York City: a so-called SIM farm in a nearby NYC apartment.

Roughly 100-thousand sim cards connected to servers and capable of sending millions of messages, overwhelming communications, potentially crippling emergency services.

Scott Thuman: The first question might be, what is a SIM card? Well, it’s this, a small, smart chip that securely stores your phone number and carrier details. It allows your phone to connect to a cellular network. It acts as your digital passport.

Michael Daniel once served as Cybersecurity Coordinator at the National Security Council under President Obama and now leads the Cyber Threat Alliance, a non profit dedicated to improving global security.

Scott Thuman: What exactly is a sim card farm?

Michael Daniel: So imagine that you take the tiny little card that’s in your cell

phone and you get hundreds of them, thousands of them, and you just stack them all

up. You could use it for a lot of different things, most of them nefarious, so you

can use it to send fraudulent texts. You could also use them to, for example,

simultaneously send text messages to a given area, and we would call that a denial of

service attack, meaning you flood the cell towers with so many messages all at once

that they can’t handle the load, and it blocks out other cell phone users trying to get through because there’s no more bandwidth left on the cell tower.

Here’s how that SIM swarm hits you on an almost daily basis: those fake job offers and opportunities, warnings you owe money for toll road violations, or that you have to pay postal service fees all designed to steal your credit card information, identity—or to influence what you’re thinking.

Scott Thuman: Is politics at play here? Would we see, for example, someone putting out something that they believe would be more divisive right now, maybe to stoke more fear or anger politically?

Michael Daniel: That’s always a possibility. You can use these sorts of things to deliver politically motivated messages. You can also use it to spread disinformation.

And make the senders plenty of cash. The Wall Street Journal reporting Chinese criminals tricked Americans out of more than one-billion dollars over the last three years just from those fake toll and postage fee texts. So who’s behind it?

Scott Thuman: It could be everyone from Russia to North Korea to China.

Michael Daniel: Yes. North Korea is a prime example of a nation state that directly uses its people to carry out cybercrime around the world to get money for the regime so they can avoid sanctions. So yes, there’s a wide variety of potential malicious actors that could be behind it.

Scott Thuman: How confident are you that law enforcement has the ability to detect these sorts of problems and shut them down?

Michael Daniel: I think it’s often very difficult for these kinds of operations to be identified remotely. Usually when law enforcement finds these things, it’s because of a human-led tip because it’s very difficult to sort of back trace to a physical location of a particular sim card. It can be done, but it’s challenging.

For now, the best defense is knowledge, that these tiny cards that connect us can also be just another Trojan Horse in today’s technology.

For Full Measure, I’m Scott Thuman in Washington.

Watch the video here.