Huge rise in phishing spam on text messages

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The Sydney Morning Herald

Digital Life

Consumer Security
Technology News
Digital Life News

Date

October 11, 2013

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Just enter password… text message phishing scams are on the rise. Photo: Greg Bakes

Nightclub fined $15,000 for spamming patrons via SMS

Mobile messaging has become so ingrained in our lives that few of us think twice about opening a text message. But criminals are increasingly using that sense of trust to distribute scams and malicious software, and mobile spam in Australia has risen dramatically.

Figures from the Australian Communications and Media Authority show complaints rose from 992 in 2008-09 to 15,835 in 2012-13 – equivalent to about 4 per cent of spam across all media.

According to the chief technology officer for anti-spam technology maker Cloudmark, Neil Cook, the relatively porous security of global SMS networks has combined with our trust of mobile devices to usher in a new wave of spam.

He said that while upwards of 90 per cent of regular email was now spam, most of this was filtered out by security software. But such protection was less common with mobile messaging.

“Users are opening it, trusting it, and much more likely to be fooled by it,” Mr Cook said. “It is very difficult for people to tell the difference between a message that is pretending to be their bank, and their actual bank.”

He attributed the growth in mobile spam to the increased availability of unlimited call plans. “It used to be uneconomic to send an SMS spam message,” Mr Cook said.

“Now bundled rate plans and even unlimited plans have made it economic to send spam, especially when combined with pre-paid SIM cards. You can stick 100 SIMs in a SIM box to send out any number of spam messages you want.”

He said many spammers were using networks in countries such as Malta and Nigeria to send messages because they offered much cheaper rates than networks in target countries.

ACMA’s manager for e-security operations, Bruce Matthews, said while text messages could be a mechanism to enable malware, the harmful content in SMS was more related to scams such as fake Lotto wins and fee fraud scams and phishing SMS to obtain personal identity information.

Mr Cook said phishing scams were becoming more sophisticated. He cited a message that encouraged users to call a number and give personal details. The message used the same voice and script as the bank it purported to be, right down to asking respondents to call back if its systems were overloaded.

Security professionals agree that mobile malware is rising. The senior technology consultant for Sophos ANZ, Sean Richmond, said Android in particular was susceptible because of its open nature. His company had identified more than 350,000 variants of Android malware, and another 230,000 variants of potentially unwanted applications which degraded the user’s experience or privacy.

“Android’s permission system isn’t finely grained enough for good security – yet it’s too complex for users to make good decisions about what to allow or block,” Mr Richmond said.

The senior global product marketing manager at Trend Micro Greg Boyle said by the end of 2012 his company had discovered over 4,000 mobile phishing URLs, and while this represented less than 1 per cent of all phishing URL detections, it represented a clear trend.

“Just last week we reported on a fake Facebook mobile page that attempts to steal users credit card information,” Mr Boyle said.

McAfee’s latest quarterly threat report listed nearly 18,000 new Android malware samples, including banking malware that intercepted the text message containing the token required to log into one’s bank account.