Tag Archives: SPIM

Managed SMS spamming services going mainstream

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By Dancho Danchev

Are you receiving SMS spam? According to the latest reports, millions of mobile users do.

The trend is largely driven by what Webroot is observing as an increase in underground market propositions offering managed SMS spamming services to new market entrants not interested in building and maintaining the spamming infrastructure on their own.

In this post, I’ll profile a recently advertised managed service offering SMS spamming capabilities to potential customers, discuss the latest innovations in this field, their impact to mobile security, and what are some of the key factors contributing to the growth of SMS spam.

More details:

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Malware targets mobile IMers

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By Andrew Brandt

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20090507_sms_comeon1Once in a while, you don’t have to do anything at all and malware just drops into your lap. That happened to me the other day, when I received a buddy request from a total stranger in my decade-old ICQ instant messenger account. It’s never failed to be a rich source for malicious links, SPIM, and other fun stuff (that is, from a malware research perspective).

ICQ is a multi-lingual community, and this request was written in the Cyrillic alphabet. My client didn’t render it properly, so I couldn’t read the text of the come-on. But I could read the plain-ASCII URL that was linked at the bottom. So, curious, I took a look. The page looks pretty basic, with text (badly translated to English) which reads “There is my candid photos))do you will hear me on him?” and a link to download a file.

20090507_sms_link

I’m a sucker for grammatically tortured social engineering, so I couldn’t resist. Yes, I thought to myself, I do will hear you on him.

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