Tag Archives: sms

DIY Russian mobile number harvesting tool spotted in the wild

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By Dancho Danchev

Earlier this year we profiled a newly released mobile/phone number harvesting application, a common tool in the arsenal of mobile spammers, as well as vendors of mobile spam services. Since the practice is an inseparable part of the mobile spamming process, cybercriminals continue periodically releasing new mobile number harvesting applications, update their features, but most interestingly, continue exclusively targeting Russian users.

In this post, I’ll profile yet another DIY mobile number harvesting tool available on the underground marketplace since 2011, and emphasize on its most recent (2013) updated feature, namely, the use of proxies.

More details: Continue reading →

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 do we use, secure, and share the information that surrounds us?

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mobilesecurityThe mobile landscape has boomed in the last couple of years mostly in part because of Android devices and social networking. This has opened the door for everyone to have access to a smartphone and have the cyber world at their fingertips. Smartphones have become an extension of us, and we now have our email, banking, social networking, television and internet on the go. We live in a world of instant access.

With this excitement and convenience, we may lose track something we take serious is our privacy and security. Looming in this mobile landscape are people who want benefit from our oversight and continuous usage. Continue reading →

Mobile spammers release DIY phone number harvesting tool

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By Dancho Danchev

Need a good reason not to connect to the public Web with your phone? Wonder where all that SMS spam is coming from? Keep reading.

Mobile phone spammers have recently released a new version of a well known phone number harvesting tool, whose main objective is to crawl the public Web and index mobile phone numbers, which will later be used for various malicious and fraudulent purposes.

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Android malware spreads through compromised legitimate Web sites

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By Dancho Danchev

Over the past 24 hours, our sensor networks picked up an interesting website infection affecting a popular Bulgarian website for branded watches, which ultimately redirects and downloads premium rate SMS Android malware on the visiting user devices. The affected Bulgarian website is only the tip of the iceberg, based on the diversified portfolio of malicious domains known to have been launched by the same party that launched the original campaign.

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Russian cybercriminals release new DIY SMS flooder

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By Dancho Danchev

Just like in every market, in the underground ecosystem demand too, meets supply on a regular basis.

Thanks to the systematically released DIY SMS flooding applications, cybercriminals have successfully transformed this market segment into a growing and professionally oriented niche market. From the active abuse of the features offered by legitimate infrastructure providers such as ICQ and Skype, to the abuse of Web-based SMS sending gateways, cybercriminals continue developing and releasing point’n'click DIY SMS flooding tools.

In this post, I’ll profile one of the most recently released DIY SMS flooders, this time relying on 23 publicly available SMS-sending Web services, primarily located in Russia.

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New Russian DIY SMS flooder using ICQ’s SMS sending feature spotted in the wild

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By Dancho Danchev

In order to emphasize on the growing trend of cybercriminals abusing legitimate infrastructure for their malicious purposes, last week, I profiled a DIY SMS flooder using Skype’s SMS-sending capability to launch a DoS (denial of service attack) against a user’s mobile device.

This week, I’ll continue providing factual evidence for the emergence of this trend, by profiling yet another recently released DIY SMS flooder, this time abusing ICQ’s sms-sending feature.

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Cybercriminals abuse Skype’s SMS sending feature, release DIY SMS flooders

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By Dancho Danchev

Cybercriminals are masters of abusing legitimate infrastructure for their malicious purposes. From phishing sites and Black Hole exploit kit landing URLs hosted on compromised servers, abuse of legitimate web email service providers’ trusted DKIM verified ecosystem, to the systematic release of DIY spamming tools utilizing a publicly obtainable database of user names as potential “touch points”, cybercriminals are on the top of their game.

In this post, I’ll profile a recently advertised DIY SMS flooder using Skype’s infrastructure for disseminating the messages, and assess the potential impact it could have on end and corporate users.

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Beware of Fake Adobe Flash Apps

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By Joe McManus

Last week Adobe announced that they would no longer be supporting Flash for Android. Adobe will be removing Flash from the Android Marketplace and users should be wary of fake Flash apps for their Android Devices.  Now to be fair to Adobe, they are not taking flash away from the Android platform but are focusing on the Adobe AIR cross platform runtime environment http://www.adobe.com/products/air.html. The reason Adobe is switching to AIR is to allow app developers to write one program for use on iOS and Android devices.

Let’s look at some of the fake Flash apps for Android that we have seen and what they do. This is just a small sampling; there are too many to highlight them all.

This first app we’ll look at is one of hundreds of premium SMS Trojans being distributed on third party markets that are fake installers for legitimate applications. What they really do is charge for what may or may not be a download of an already free app. The scam works when the user agrees to their ‘Terms’ and the app will send out three SMS messages containing SMS short codes that come with a fee. These messages go to a premium service setup by the malware author and will appear as charges on you phone bill. The charges vary depending on the user’s location but range around $8-12.

This has appeared many times as Flash Player 11, Flash Payer 10, FlashPlayer, etc. Webroot detects them as Android.FakeInst and has been tracking these type of fake installer for over a year; here, here and here.

Our next example is another scam of sorts. It doesn’t charge for anything but will install a bunch of aggressive advertising SDKs that are known to create ad-related notifications, shortcuts and bookmarks. This app requests 24 Android OS and device-specific permissions when, at most, it would need the INTERNET and WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permissions. The additional 22 permissions are for the ad SDKs. Webroot detects one of the ad SDKs bundled with the app as a Potentially Unwanted Application (PUA) and labels it  Android.Ads.Plankton.B.

Although it does download Adobe Flash for Android after agreeing to their License Agreement it does come with the cost of a bunch of other non-flash related stuff.

This final example is for an app that claims to be Flash Player but really installs an Adobe Flash Icon, that merely opens a browser window full of advertisements. These types of apps are annoying and really are meant to drive web traffic to sites so the developer can receive pay-per-click revenue, and in this case they deceive the customer into thinking they’re getting a known productive app. Like the previous example, this app isn’t malicious, but it’s more deceptive and doesn’t deliver on what it claims, for that Webroot detects Android.DreamStepFlash as a PUA.

Malicious and untrustworthy apps come in many different flavors, and as you can see, Adobe Flash is one that is used to lure unsuspecting users to install. Adobe will continue to release security updates for Adobe Flash and suggests you uninstall if your device is able to upgrade to Android 4.1.

Remember, always choose your apps wisely and download from a trusted source. Check reviews, research the developer and verify permissions requested before downloading.

French Android Users Hit again by SMS Trojan

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By Nathan Collier

Earlier this year, the SMS Trojan Foncy was discovered targeting French-speaking Android Users. Now, we’ve come across a new Trojan targeting them using a similar SMS scam.  The app pretends to be an app called BlackMart Alpha, which is already a little shady since it’s used to download apps that may otherwise cost money. This app is not found on Google Play and is not malicious in itself, but the fact that you can’t get it in the Google Play store makes it a prefect target for malware developers to make fake versions of it. Webroot detects this Trojan as Android.SMS.FakeB-Mart.  It works by sending premium SMS messages to two different numbers (81211 and 81038), which have both been involved with scams that add a hefty Euro charge to the victim’s phone bill. In one case, someone was scammed out of €89.85 , or $110.49. Once the malicious app is installed, it looks like the legitimate BlackMart Alpha app, but doesn’t completely load. A pop-up box opens stating that it’s loading with a increasing percentage. This tricks the user into thinking the app is loading while it’s really sending premium SMS messages in the background.

The app deletes any incoming SMS messages from 81211 to hide any confirmation SMS messages.

Being tricked by this fake blackmarket app when trying to download pirated apps could end up being a lot more expensive than just paying for the app from a trusted app market. Another lesson to always install apps from trusted markets.