Cyber Doomsday Stopped As Agents Uncover Covert Phone Farm Built To Jam 911 And Plunge New York Into Digital Darkness

New York City barely averted a full-on digital blackout during the United Nations General Assembly, and almost no one noticed.

In fact, when motorcades snarled Manhattan and almost 150 world leaders converged on midtown hotels, the U.S. Secret Service was quietly shutting down an enormous secret telecom network that could have knocked the city out at any time, according to investigators.

Federal officials say they found over 300 secret SIM servers spread across the tristate area, stuffed with over 100,000 SIM cards. They were in place and ready to go, and even more were primed to double, then triple the network’s reach. With all of them active, the system could have inundated New York’s telecom infrastructure with as many as 30 million text messages per minute, scrambling cell towers, jamming 911 calls, and blacking out signals across the city. The SIM servers were also only 35 miles from the United Nations, set to go just as world leaders were convening for one of the busiest, most delicate weeks on the global calendar.

Officials say it could have allowed bad actors to cloak encrypted conversations between foreign operatives, organized crime networks, and even terrorists. In other words, it was a war dialing machine ready to jam New York into digital chaos, at the push of a button. The forensic examination is only in early stages, but some initial findings indicate that the devices stored communications between foreign nation-state actors and other individuals already known to federal investigators. No specific groups have been named, but the project is described as multimillion-dollar, “highly sophisticated” and far beyond the scope of ordinary cybercriminals.

The operation to stop the network before it could go live was led by the Secret Service’s recently created Advanced Threat Interdiction Unit. It worked with a host of partners from across the government, including the Department of Homeland Security, the DOJ, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the NYPD. The idea was simple yet urgent – to get the infrastructure out of the country before it could be flipped on, in the worst possible moment, when New York’s defenses were most at risk.

Even so, authorities say the story may not be over. McCool left a chilling warning “Could there be others? It’d be unwise to think that there’s not other networks out there being made in other cities in the United States.” In other words, New York may have dodged a digital 9/11, but the hidden war for control of America’s communications has already begun.