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Three men are facing charges in Toronto SMS Blaster arrests

173 points by gnabgib

by alister

6 subcomments

In Brazil, people get so much SMS spam and phone call spam that many people turn off notifications for all text messages and phone calls and use only Whatsapp (even for voice calls).
But once in a while my iPhone in Brazil will get spam as a unblockable "system message". I'm not sure if I'm using the correct term. I'm mean that it looks just like an Apple system notification and it disappears without a trace afterward, but the content is obviously spam.
I wonder how they are able to do this.

by nubinetwork

7 subcomments

This was hugely overblown in the media... While the device operates like a stingray, they were using it to spam and phish. The whole claim of "we've never seen this type of device before in Canada" is a lie, because the government and law enforcement both use them. I guess it's okay if they do it, but nobody else can...

by dreamlayers

7 subcomments

How is this possible? Are phones willing to connect to any cell and blindly trust that text messages from there are genuine and really coming from the numbers they claim to be coming from? Isn't there some cryptographic verification?

by ndisn

1 subcomments

>Dafeng Lin, 27, of Hamilton, Junmin Shi, 25, of Markham, and Weitong Hu, 21, of Markham

by rafram

2 subcomments

Why would someone use one of these instead of good old fashioned SMS / iMessage / email spam?

by numpad0

2 subcomments

Oh so it's happening in Canada too? I've seen it reported on media in another place few months back.
Someone's shipping a standardized kit of Stingray with battery and PSU to be installed in the back of German station wagons. The kits are suspected to be spamming phishing texts, at least some in Chinese. The cars are driven as unregistered taxis paid for on Chinese platforms, avoiding taxes while also justifying its driving routes and expenses that involve tourist destinations.
It's not clear to me if this Chinese authority/PLA doing or if it's another one of those southern Chinese warlord thing, both sounds plausible.

by awei

1 subcomments

would encrypting sms and using some kind of authorized certificate authorities, maybe the ones from the country's phone carriers, alleviate this issue?

by SadErn

0 subcomment

by AirMax98

4 subcomments

Quote from article:
> This wasn’t targeting a single individual or business. It had the ability to reach thousands of devices at once.
This statement reads as AI-assisted — kinda interesting to see, because I am not sure it even is? This type of formal speech language is basically unintelligible from slop now.

by cnst

0 subcomment

These things just prove that the entire "security" industry is a sham.
At one point, every bank would ensure that your password COULD NOT be saved by your browser, because sEcUrItY.
Which is precisely the scenario where typing your password into a site like this is possible.

by topspin

6 subcomments

Charges? Cool. In the US we find huge SIM farms in major cities[1], law enforcement shrugs, and everyone forgets about it.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/how-sim-farms-like-the-o...