I am not one to raise a red flag and say this is huge but this could have been absolutely catastrophic. With all of the powerful people in NYC this week for the General Assembly its safe to say it was a huge target and there are plenty of people who would love to cause chaos right now.
In the largest seizure of its kind, the U.S. Secret Service announced Tuesday that the agency found active SIM farms at abandoned apartment buildings located at more than five sites. In total, law enforcement discovered 300 SIM servers – over 100,000 SIM cards – enabling encrypted, anonymous communication and capable of sending 30 million text messages per minute. Officials say the servers were so powerful they could have disabled cell phone towers and launched distributed denial of services attacks with the ability to block emergency communications like EMS and police dispatch.
Even if nothing had happened and instead the network itself was just attacked the result would have been horrible for the US and how people view it. Instead.... well the US secures another win.