According to the recently published Kaspersky Security Bulletin 2012, 99% of newly discovered mobile malicious programs target the Android platform, with a very small amount targeting Java- and Symbian-based smartphones.
2012 was the second year to show explosive growth in Android malware. From a negligible eight new unique malicious programs in January 2011, the average monthly discovery rate for new Android malware in 2011 went up to more than 800 samples.
In 2012 Kaspersky Lab identified an average of 6300 new mobile malware samples every month. Overall, in 2012 the number of known malicious samples for Android increased more than eight times.
According to The Straits Times, at least 10 people fell prey to a new SMS scam, which sends text messages to potential victims from an unknown mobile number, threatening to harass them if they did not repay their "loans" from illegal moneylenders.
Fearing for their safety, these victims transferred a total of about $18,000 to bank account numbers provided by the culprits, said the police in a crime alert on Thursday.
This after the culprits threatened to damage the victims' homes by splashing paint or setting fire, or locking the gates, if the repayments were not made.
The messages were sent to victims even though a majority of them had no dealings with loan sharks.
There have been more than 180 reports of such cases over the past one month, with victims making reports to the police from early March.
It's definitively a bad idea to visit pornography sites on your smartphone or tablet. CNN explains why.
Nearly one-quarter of malware on mobile devices comes from porn websites, according to a new study from Blue Coat, a Web security and optimization company.
Mobile users don't check out porn sites often -- less than 1% of all mobile traffic is pornography. But when they do go to those sites, the risk of inadvertently downloading malware to their devices increases three-fold. That makes watching porn on smartphones a far bigger threat than viewing porn on a PC.
Porn led to more malware on smartphones and tablets than e-mail spam, malicious websites, and fake apps combined.
Popular U.S. pizza chain Papa John's faces a $250 million class-action lawsuit for blasting customers with illegal text messages. CNN reports.
The plaintiffs allege that Papa John's franchises sent customers a total of 500,000 unwanted messages in early 2010. The spam texts offered deals for pizza, and some customers complained they were getting 15 or 16 texts in a row, even during the middle of the night, according Donald Heyrich, an attorney representing the class.
The pizza franchises sent the text blasts through a mass text messaging service called OnTime4U, which is also a defendant in the case.
If you want to steal money by picking pockets then you face weeks of training.
Unless, of course, you decide to profit by taking cash from the phones in people's pockets. You could learn how to do that right now. If you can click a mouse button twice you can create a malicious computer program that can steal money from a smartphone.
The two-click fraud system is hosted on a website based in Russia which lets anyone who signs up create mobile malware.
With malware becoming a genuine threat on smartphones, AT&T is hoping businesses—and eventually consumers—will be willing to pay for an extra subscription service to protect gadgets against viruses and malware with an app and a filtering service that runs on the carrier's network.
AT&T Mobile Security is being offered only to businesses for now, but next year the company plans to make it available to consumers, too.
Cellphones have made it easier to stay in touch, but they have also brought everyone closer to scam artists and tricksters, who are just a few numbers away from separating you from thousands of dollars. USA Today reports.
Anyone with a phone number is a target, and there is no shortage of flim-flam schemes. Here's a look at some scams happening now across the US:
Jailhouse jingles. An inmate calls collect from jail and tricks you into dialing a number starting with *72. But *72 activates call forwarding, giving control of your phone to the inmate -- who then makes long-distance phone calls or racks up fees on 900 numbers on your bill.
Text message identity rip-off. A scammer offers a free $1,000 Walmart gift card through a link in a text message. When you click it, a website comes up requesting personal information that can be used to steal your identity.
Also: Granny scam, Utility scam, Election scam.
About 70% of spam text messages are financially motivated scams. In July, there were about 30 million spam texts a day, and if things continue at the rate they're going, the average for September will be 45 million a day, says Mary Landesman, senior security researcher for Cloudmark, a messaging security company.
Al-Jazeera has become the second news agency in a little more than a month to be targeted by pro-Syrian government hackers. C/net reports.
The Qatar-based satellite TV station revealed in a tweet this morning that its short messaging service had been compromised and used to send false news reports, including a report that Qatar's prime minister had been assassinated.
A group calling itself the Syrian Electronic Army reportedly claimed responsibility for the hack, the second attack on the satellite network in less than a week. The broadcaster reported Wednesday that several of its Web sites had been hacked and defaced with pro-Syrian government slogans.
Spam text messaging is on the rise — it's estimated that American cell phone owners received billions of spam texts last year. And they're not just annoying, they can be costly, too. Host Michel Martin speaks with telecommunications expert Ben Levitan on npr about what consumers and cell phone providers can do to prevent spam text messages.
According to the BBC, thousands of Australians have received a "death threat" text, demanding they pay 5,000 Australian dollars ($5,140) or face being murdered. The scale of the scam has surprised the police authorities.
Det Supt Brian Hay said that the scale of the scam was "unprecedented".
"We've never see this anything like this before - to have so many people contacted at the same time."
"There is an extraordinary amount of Australian consumer data that they are exploiting," he added.
He added that the scam was likely to be the work of organised criminals rather than an individual.
In the run-up to the holy Muslim month of Ramadan, the number of spam SMS messages on Islamic themes — featuring verses from the Koran, the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, exhortations to be charitable and advice on how to pray — is soaring. For some, this use of mobile telephony is evidence of the Pakistani public’s growing religiosity. For others, it’s an annoying intrusion. The International Herald Tribune reports.
Under the guise of outreach, religious organizations are mimicking advertisers and trying to tap the vast market of cellphone users in Pakistan, which boasted more than 114 million subscribers as of January. In addition to promoting religious textbooks and deals for travel to Mecca, the text messages invite users to access more religious content via SMS after paying a premium.
In the late 1970s, the cutting edge of communications technologies was the autodialer, a machine capable of calling up scores of people in one shot, with little human involvement. It was innovative, and annoying. By the early ’90s, Congress had had enough. “Computerized calls,” railed South Carolina Democrat Fritz Hollings from the Senate floor, “are the scourge of modern civilization.” Reuters reports.
And so, Congress legislated. But the focus was on commercial calls. Mindful of the free flow of speech and – let’s be honest – interested in self-preservation, lawmakers exempted political calls from its Telecommunications Consumer Protection Act. But Congress decided that some phones were too sensitive to get even autodialed political calls: those in hospitals, those designated for emergency purposes – and those in our pockets.
But here we are, some two decades later, and voters across the country are getting political text messages they never asked for.
... These text messages aren’t actually, technically text messages as we normally think of them. They’re more like emails that show up as texts. And that introduces a loophole through which these texts are arriving.
There’s an another way to deliver text to a phone that most of us don’t use: sending an email to an address made up of a cell phone number and what’s called an SMS gateway, like @txt.att.net. To the person getting the message, it looks much like a text. To the person sending it, though, it feels like an email. And if it’s the latter, the rules are different.
The unwelcome messages that have been clogging e-mail inboxes for two decades have made the jump to handsets, as more people use smartphones in place of personal computers and texting becomes more popular. Bloomberg reports.
The number of U.S. spam text messages rose 45 percent last year to 4.5 billion messages, said Richi Jennings, an industry analyst. Spam phone calls also are proliferating. The surge is costing carriers money and frustrating users, who must pay for the messages and deal with potentially fraudulent texts.
Spammers can get phone numbers from the Internet, or use software or websites to randomly generate thousands or even millions of numbers in a particular area code. Often using prepaid phones that can’t be traced back to the sender, they can then use auto-dialing technology to reach recipients.
Once the scourge of e-mail providers and the Postal Service, spammers have infiltrated the last refuge of spam-free communication: cellphones. In the United States, consumers received roughly 4.5 billion spam texts last year, more than double the 2.2 billion received in 2009, according to Ferris Research, a market research firm that tracks spam.
Nearly one in five mobile phone users have experienced some type of security threat with their device. That's the finding of a Cloudmark survey of 1,000 cellphone users, scheduled to be released Tuesday, reports USA Today.
Poison text messages, nearly non-existent in the U.S. a few years ago, grew 300% in 2010 and 400% in 2011, accounting for about 1% of all text messages.
One type of poison text message involves tricking people into signing up for worthless services for which they get billed $9.99 a month. Another type lures them into doing a survey to win a free iPhone or gift card.
Cellular News reports that a preliminary settlement has been reached in a class action lawsuit relating to the alleged transmission of text-message advertisements to 47 million people across the USA.
According to the settlement, the lawsuit is against two companies that allegedly benefited from text-message advertisements sent by one of the companies.
The settlement establishes a US$12.2 million cash settlement fund out of which payments of up to $100 will be made to each wireless account holder who received a text message from B2Mobile, as well as administrative costs and attorneys' fees.
Recently the team at Tatango surveyed 500 U.S. consumers and asked them about their experience with text message spam. The results have been packaged into the following Text Message Spam Infographic.
According to DigitalTrends, malware is becoming increasingly problematic for smartphone owners using the Android operating system.
A security firm named Dasient studied 10,000 applications for Android smartphones and found that more than 8 percent of the applications are transmitting personal user data to unauthorized computers. This form of malware is designed to take control of a user’s smartphone.
For instance, eleven of the malware-filled applications automatically sent text messages to entire contact lists, much like email spammers taking control of another account. If a user pays for SMS messages rather than an unlimited plan, it can easily rack up charges without any interaction from the user besides downloading the application.
According to an article in The Telegraph, British mobile telephone numbers are being offered for sale over the internet and used to send nuisance text messages.
A salesman for an Indian company offered details of telephone numbers of people without any proof they had given permission to receive texts — opening the way to them being bombarded with messages including ones enticing them to claim compensation for accidents or mis-sold financial products.
... There have been a series of cases where confidential data belonging to customers of British companies, including banks like HSBC, have been illegally sold by call centre workers in India.Many major UK companies use call centres based in India, including BT, British Gas and major insurance firms — although there is no suggestion that their centres were being used by RouteSMS.
But this latest disclosure raises new concerns over the security of every British mobile telephone.
The Nation reports on text messages circulating in Pakistan following the killing of Bin Laden, conveying the sinking public trust in the armed forces. Specifically resentment over the performance of Pakistan Army and specifically its radar system.
A country that thrives on rumour and gossip, the messages all shared a common theme: radars for sale and last words of Osama Bin Laden. Messages read:
“ Radar For Sale, Model No. 438, Pakistan Army made, can’t detect USA helicopters but can receive Star Plus (an Indian entertainment TV channel), only for Rs999. Please contact General Ashfaq Kayani.”
and:
Pak Army’s latest air surveillance radar for sale, though it cant detect enemy’s choppers or aircrafts but it is good to get Star TV, Discovery and other TV channels.”
Residents of the Gaza Strip have reported that they received a number of text messages from an Israeli number offering an award, in exchange for any information on Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier who was captured on 25 June 2006 by Hamas in a cross-border raid. ynet news reports.
According to the report, the message was sent from a mobile number and offered $10 million for credible information about the location of the captive soldier. Palestinians have made reports of similar messages in the past.
On the eve of the Pakistan-India cricket semi-final, there were few if any who were spared from SMS spam. These messages ranged from tickets to match-viewing events to various special deals just for the day. The Express Tribune reports.
One SMS marketer, on the condition of anonymity revealed that he had lists of over 30,000 subscribers within the Defence Housing Authority area in Karachi. He was a relative new-comer to the market and installed readily available bulk SMS software on a used computer.
How he got the lists was a trade secret but the computer itself had a couple of GPRS modems fitted with SIM cards that were kept on rotation which is information readily available to anyone who cares to Google it. When questioned about the legitimacy of the medium his response was a nonchalant “there is nothing really wrong with it, nobody really cares”.
... While it is hard to estimate the contribution of spam to the overall SMS traffic in Pakistan, the problem seems to be growing worse as more telemarketers enter the fray and phone number catalogues grow larger. Telecoms are reluctant to take any proactive measures since higher SMS volumes result in higher revenue.
Four Chinese men have been sent to prison for sending millions of spam text messages without having a licence from the government telecommunications body. [via TwoCircles.net]
The four men sent 300,000 group messages to mobile phone users every week for their clients without a license from China Telecom, a court was told.
The spam messages included advertisements for housing, furniture, downloads of ring tones and mobile games, the China Daily reported.
The accused admitted sending the mass texts but said they never sent anything related to pornography.
The four men made over 300,000 yuan (around $45,750) from their illegal operation. They have been jailed from periods ranging from 13 to 18 months.
A Chinese anti-virus software company has been accused of deliberately installing viruses onto people's mobile phones in order to charge them to remove it, reports Cellular-News.
A report by the Chinese State-TV service claimed that NetQin - which has recently filed for a stock market listing in the USA - would covertly install a malware app into a handset whenever its own anti-virus program was installed.
Police arrested a 28-year-old man in Seoul for spreading rumours through online messaging and text messages that radioactive materials would soon reach the peninsula.
Fears over radiation have been spreading, prompting Seoul, the closest foreign capital to the crippled nuclear plant in Fukushima, to crack down on scaremongering and warn against panic buying.
"Please do not be swayed by unfounded rumours or unscientific speculations about nuclear fallout," said South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak.
A text message circulating in Singapore on Tuesday warning about possible radioactive rain following the explosion in nuclear reactor in Japan have been dismissed by scientists and authorities as a hoax.
The National Environment Agency said that Singapore would not be affected by radioactive rain because the nuclear reactors in Japan were thousands of kilometers away, local media reported.
The Philippine Atmospheric and Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (Pagasa) alleviated the public's fears of a nuclear fallout allegedly resulting from a leak from one of the nuclear plants in Japan following an 8.9-magnitude earthquake last week. The Inquirer reports.
“It does not make sense,” said weather forecaster Raymond Ordinario when asked to react to text messages warning the public of possible contaminated rainfall caused by radiation emitted from a leak inside the Fukushima plant.
One text message spreading allegedly from BBC says, “Japan govt confirms radiation leak at Fukushima nuclear plants. Asian countries should take necessary precautions. Remain indoors first 24hrs. Close doors n windows. Swab neck skin with betadine where thyroid area is, radiation hits thyroid first. Take extra precaution, radiation may hit Philat startng 4pm 2day. Pls send to ur loved ones."
According to the Huffington Post, HSBC Bank customers have been receiving fraudulent text messages in recent days asking them to dial in to a 1-800 number and enter their account information over the phone.
Customer service personnel at HSBC confirmed that the text message scam had impacted numerous bank customers since Monday, but a spokesman for the bank said there is no evidence of any HSBC "data breach" or of any customer information, including credit card numbers, being compromised.
The text message read, "HSBC ALERT," and provided a number to call, which led to a professional recording that asked for account information.
In the western world, receiving an illicit text is a minor annoyance, but it's a major problem in developing countries like India. In that country, it is estimated that 100 million spam messages are sent every day, according to a report issued last year by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. Now, a system that filters out SMS spam by enlisting the help of your friends could calm things down. New Scientist reports.
SMS filtering is not a new idea, and existing methods work much like email spam detectors. They all learn to identify spam messages by examining known spam, but this is less effective for SMS messages because their brevity makes it hard to identify features unique to spam. Abbreviations and regional words, common in text messages, make this even worse.
Kumaraguru's team worked around these limitations by relying on crowdsourced spam markers. SMSAssassin learns in the same way as other spam filters, and the researchers hope toone day allow users to share spam keywords with one another through a central server or by creating a distributed network via Bluetooth.
The team say this will let the system react quickly to new kinds of spam or messages tied to certain time periods, such as the Diwali religious festival. For now they are gathering user data by asking users to contribute their spam through a Facebook page.
According to the recently published 
2012 was the second year to show explosive growth in Android malware. From a negligible eight new unique malicious programs in January 2011, the average monthly discovery rate for new Android malware in 2011 went up to more than 800 samples.
Popular U.S. pizza chain Papa John's faces a $250 million class-action lawsuit for blasting customers with illegal text messages. 
In the run-up to the holy Muslim month of Ramadan, the number of spam SMS messages on Islamic themes — featuring verses from the Koran, the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, exhortations to be charitable and advice on how to pray — is soaring. For some, this use of mobile telephony is evidence of the Pakistani public’s growing religiosity. For others, it’s an annoying intrusion. 
In the late 1970s, the cutting edge of communications technologies was the autodialer, a machine capable of calling up scores of people in one shot, with little human involvement. It was innovative, and annoying. By the early ’90s, Congress had had enough. “Computerized calls,” railed South Carolina Democrat Fritz Hollings from the Senate floor, “are the scourge of modern civilization.” 
According to 
According to an article in 
Residents of the Gaza Strip have reported that they received a number of text messages from an Israeli number offering an award, in exchange for any information on 
In the western world, receiving an illicit text is a minor annoyance, but it's a major problem in developing countries like India. In that country, it is estimated that 100 million spam messages are sent every day, according to a report issued last year by the 
