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.
More consumers are buying smartphones. So more criminals are taking aim at those devices. The New York Times reports.
With smartphones outselling PCs for the first time — 421 million of the hand-held computers are expected to be sold worldwide this year, according to market analysts at IDC — the long-predicted crime wave on hand-held devices appears to have arrived. According to the mobile-security firm Lookout, malware and spyware appeared on 9 out of 100 phones it scanned in May, more than twice the 4-in-100 rate in December 2009.
In fact, the most practical rule for protecting yourself is to start thinking of the smartphone as a PC.
-- UK police making Gil Grissom jealous... - The Forensic Science Service (FSS) has developed a mobile laboratory which will travel to crime scenes and carry out real-time forensic investigation and analysis.
-- Police turn forensic skills on handhelds - Handhelds are likelier to lead to handcuffs for techie criminals following the release of a report from the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
-- Mobile phone forensics 'hole' reported - Police investigations are being hindered by the use of proprietary mobile phone technologies, say forensics experts.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is taking legal steps to shut down a massive text-messaging spam operation that blanketed mobile phones with millions of unsolicited texts over the past year and a half. Security News Daily reports.
Beginning in August 2009, Flora’s Huntington Beach, Calif.-based operation sent at least 5 million messages; at one point, he was sending 85 texts per minute, the FTC said.
The FTC’s legal complaint alleges that Flora’s texts included links to websites with “.gov” that were “not operated by or affiliated with any governmental entity,” the FTC said.
If recipients responded to Flora’s unsolicited messages, he then sold their mobile phone number to third-party marketers. In addition, many consumers had to pay overage fees for the spam texts, the FTC said.
Hamas warned Gaza residents not to reply to text messages from Israel aimed at helping the Jewish state uncover Gilad Shalit's location, an Israeli soldier who was captured in 2006. Ynet.News reports.
Hamas' Interior Ministry, which is also in charge of security, issued a statement among Gazans claiming that "Israeli's intelligence" sends text message to Gaza cell phones in an effort to elicit information on Shalit. The messages include a phone number that Gaza residents can call, Hamas said.
The group warned residents in Gaza not to contact those who send such messages or reply to them in any way.
The GSMA will recommend that operators join a program that allows mobile subscribers to report SMS spam using short codes in an effort to gather more data on a growing annoyance. PC World reports.
AT&T, Bell Mobility, KT (Korea Telecom), SFR, Sprint, Vodafone and the Korean Internet & Security Agency participated in the pilot.
... SMS spammers will often buy lots of prepaid SIM cards and send messages until the balance runs out. The problem got so bad in China that most SIM cards are only allowed to send 1,000 SMSes, Alan Ranger, vice president for Cloudmark's mobile marketing, said.
Some of the worst locales for SMS spam are South Korea and China. A Chinese mobile phone user may get upwards of 30 spam SMSes a day, while those in South Korea report thousands of spam SMSes a day.
“We believe there are two distinct situations being discussed on this issue chain,” said Google in a post on the bug’s thread in its forums. “Fortunately, we have fixes for both of them.” [via eWEEKeurope]
The search giant had problems isolating and understand the problem, because the problem is rare, and users on the forum were confusing two separate SMS issues, both of which could result in messages going astray, Google said.
They were supposed to be agents of compassion, but lotteries in Kenya have turned into wheels of fortunes for shady businessmen. Business Daily Africa reports.
Investigations by the Business Daily into the ongoing SMS lotteries that have raised eyebrows for the big prizes being paid out to winners - with little being passed on to charitable causes - pointed to the underworld scheme to fleece gullible Kenyans of their hard earned monies.
It emerged that local casinos were flouting anti-money laundering laws that require gamblers to declare the source of their money, with some of the owners behind the lotteries where participants are winning unprecedented prizes in cash.
Malicious text messages that could disrupt a wide range of handsets is all over the news today. Coined "SMS of death", it makes for attention grabbing headlines. [via Gizmodo]
Despite how obsessed we may be with smartphones, it's the simplest cellphones which are most common—and the most vulnerable. In fact, it seems that many of those phones could be rendered useless by a maliciously crafted SMS.
It hasn't happened yet. But speaking at the Chaos Computer Club Congress in Berlin, German researchers showed how vulnerabilities in some the simplest, but most common phones in the world could conceivably lead to just such a scenario.
As consumers and companies embrace smartphones to do more of their computing, the wireless industry is taking its first steps to beef up security on mobile devices. The WSJ reports.
Carriers are deploying new services and cutting deals with start-ups to help protect people from malicious attacks and misuse of their personal data stored on a smartphone. Meanwhile, handset makers and chip firms are taking steps to fortify their hardware as the number of attacks on mobile devices grows larger and more sophisticated.
In the first week of September, about 1 million cell phones in China were found to have been affected by a new virus, one that spreads quickly by random and mass sending of text messages, according to State broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV).
Computer scientists at Freie Universität Berlin are working to improve the immune system of mobile devices. The research is being coordinated by Freie Universität and conducted jointly with experts in mobile systems and security in Hamburg and Bochum. The project is being funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research for two and a half years with almost one million euros.
Their aim is to protect devices from unauthorized access from outside. “Similar to our biological immune system, each device must learn from the threats and build defense strategies, while making it possible to reduce the spread of infections.” said Jochen Schiller, professor of computer science and head of the project.
It was only a matter of time, but it looks like mobile applications are now sufficiently ubiquitous to attract the serious attention of cyber criminals. Computer Weekly reports.
In June, Apple banned a developer after he hacked around 400 iTunes accounts. At the end of July we heard that 4.6 million Android users had downloaded a suspicious app that transmits data to a site in China. Other stories are starting to raise similar worries.
What these cases show, and what security professionals have long suspected, is that app store checks are far from foolproof, and mobile operating systems have vulnerabilities.
The problem, as is so often the case, is that neither mobile devices, mobile software, nor applications are designed with security as a priority. In the rush to get products to market and the desire to offer increased functionality, security is not given proper consideration.
According to The Times of India, Rumors in Nagpur are scaring cell phones users, claiming that calls from certain numbers cause instant death when the call is answered.
The police has been flooded with calls and enquiries such as
one about a nine-year-old girl allegedly dying at Subhas Nagar and another of a teenager's death due to bleeding from ears after receiving the call at Siras Peth.
Attendees at the annual Defcon hacking conference in Las Vegas might be advised to keep their cell phones powered off at the show, where one prominent security researcher says he will demonstrate a way to transparently intercept and eavesdrop on cell phone calls. InfoWorld reports.
... Chris Paget of security firm H4RDW4RE, LCC said in a blog post that he would be conducting a "pretty spectacular demonstration of cellphone insecurity at Defcon" - during presentation called The presentation, dubbed "Practical Cellphone Spying," - in which the researcher "will intercept the cellular phone calls of the audience without any action required on their part."
Recent research from two universities suggests that remote-eavesdropping scenario may soon be possible. PC World reports.
Imagine sitting in a café and discussing the details of a business proposal with a potential client. Neither you nor the client has a laptop; you're just two people having a conversation. But unbeknownst to you, someone half a world away is listening to every word you say. Later, as you leave, you receive a text message referring to the proposal and demanding money in exchange for silence.
According to South Africa's daily Citizen, the intelligence community is investigating the origins of a “mischievous” SMS that has sowed panic in Polokwane and prompted the provincial police commissioner to place his forces on high alert.
The SMS, which warns that there are pamphlets being distributed around Polokwane which are urging black people each to kill as many whites as possible during today’s Freedom Day celebrations, has been distributed countrywide over the past few days.
Polokwane police reportedly went on high alert shortly after the SMS began circulating and police patrols have been intensified in Limpopo province. No such pamphlets seem to exist, however, and the intelligence services are now tracing the source of the rumour.
Recently a new mobile virus named "MMS Bomber" has run rampant in China, and millions of Chinese mobile phones were impacted, reported Beijing Business News.
The virus is disguised as an application; once installed, the virus will automatically connect to the internet and send MMS containing a malicious URL to random mobile phone numbers without the user's awareness, and result in finance losses to mobile users.
Once infected, the virus will disable the system management program on the mobile phone, and mobile users will not be able to uninstall the virus,
According to the settlement, the lawsuit is against two companies that allegedly benefited from text-message advertisements sent by one of the companies.
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 
“We believe there are two distinct situations being discussed on this issue chain,” said Google in a 
Attendees at the annual 
Recent research from two universities suggests that remote-eavesdropping scenario may soon be possible. 
