Tag Archives: Quality Assurance

How mobile spammers verify the validity of harvested phone numbers – part two

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By Dancho Danchev

Just as we anticipated earlier this year in our “How mobile spammers verify the validity of harvested phone number” post, mobile spammers and cybercriminals in general will continue ensuring that QA (Quality Assurance) is applied to their upcoming campaigns. This is done in an attempt to both successfully reach a wider audience and to charge a higher price for a verified database of mobile numbers.

In this post I’ll profile yet another commercially available phone/mobile number verification tool that’s exclusively supporting Huawei 3G USB modems.

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How mobile spammers verify the validity of harvested phone numbers

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By Dancho Danchev

Have you ever received a blank call, and no one was on the other side of the line? What about a similar blank SMS received through your mobile carrier’s Mail2SMS gateway? There’s a high probability that it was a mobile spammer who’s automatically and efficiently verifying the validity of a recently harvested database of mobile numbers, with QA (Quality Assurance) in mind. These verified databases will be later on used as the foundation for a highly successful spam/scam/malicious software disseminating campaigns, thanks to the fact that the cybercriminals behind them will no longer be shooting into the dark. How do they do that? What kind of tools do they use?

Let’s find out by profiling a Russian DIY (do it yourself) software vendor, that’s been operating since 2011, and is currently offering a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) based phone number verification tool, as well as USB-modem based phone number verification application.

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How malware authors evade antivirus detection

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By Dancho Danchev

Aiming to ensure that their malware doesn’t end up in the hands of vendors and researchers, cybercriminals are actively experimenting with different quality assurance processes whose objective is to increase the probability of their campaigns successfully propagating in the wild without detection.

Some of these techniques include multiple offline antivirus scanning interfaces offering the cybercriminal a guarantee that their malicious program would remain undetected, before they launch their malicious campaign in the wild.

In the wild since 2006, Kim’s Multiple Antivirus Scanner is still actively used among cybercriminals wanting to ensure that their malicious software is pre-scanned against the signature-based scanning techniques offered by multile antivirus vendors.

Let’s review Kim’s Multiple Antivirus Scanner, and discuss when it’s an important tool in the arsenal of the malicious cybercriminal spreading malware for profit.

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