AT&T, the biggest US mobile carrier and the world's largest telecommunications company has a special, secretive feature that enables SIM cards it issues to send SMS messages back to the AT&T "mothership" - unbeknownst to the user of a device, while in no manner affected by them.
In a way, the device is also "unaware" that this is happening, since the practice is "silent" and leaves no trace on the phone itself.
This is what transpired from research revealed in July by David Allen Burgess, a telecom veteran in SIGINT (signals intelligence) and commercial equipment, whose interest in the behavior of AT&T SIMs arose from a legal case he was involved in at the request of an attorney, in the spring of this year.
What Burgess discovered - while trying to parse how and why a strange SMS had been sent to a number that doesn't fit any standard structure of mobile numbers used in the US (which turned out to belong to to the telecom behemoth) - was that the SIM card was capable of sending text messages on its own. This is known as the "proactive MO-SMS" feature.
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