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CIA Thwarts Major Telecom Attack in NY

The U.S. Secret Service has dismantled a massive hidden telecom network in New York. Investigators say the system could have crippled cell towers and jammed 911 calls.

Coming as foreign leaders filled midtown hotels and motorcades clogged Manhattan, officials say the takedown highlights a new frontier of risk: plots aimed at the invisible infrastructure that keeps a modern city connected. Spread across multiple sites, the servers functioned like banks of mock cellphones, able to generate mass calls and texts, overwhelm local networks and mask encrypted communications criminals, officials said. More than 100,000 were already active, investigators said, but there were also large numbers waiting to be deployed, evidence that operators were preparing to double or even triple the network’s capacity, McCool said.

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