It seems that phones are no longer as secure as they used to be and that there are more and more attempts by cybercriminals to steal sensitive data, passwords, and bank information from their users. Moreover, according to Proofpoint, a company that researches and analyzes security trends in the cyber world, the risk of malware attacks on mobile phone users has increased fivefold during the first months of 2022.
The people behind such attacks want to steal as much important data as possible from mobile phone users, including passwords for email and bank accounts, but also to secretly install malware on phones that has the ability to record audio, track the user’s location and even to delete data from the phone.
Currently, both Apple and Android mobile phones are under attack, but the very open source nature of the Android operating system makes it more suitable for malignant attacks. Some of the attempts are classic phishing, where SMS messages with present links are used with the aim of deceiving users into revealing their information. In the last echo of the pandemic, the most successful attempts concerned false information related to the current health situation.
On the other hand, there are more sophisticated attempts in the form of bots, the most famous of which is FluBot, which has been active since November 2020, but which has become widespread to unprecedented proportions in the first months of this year. This bot has the ability to spread using information from the user’s directory and automatically sends messages to random numbers found there. The upgrade of this concept arrived in 2021 in the form of TangleBot, which has the added ability to intercept audio and video recordings of users.
As they work on the principle of user fraud, the best protection against these types of mallware is caution. You should not click on the links that appear in SMS messages, which sounds very logical. However, malware continues to spread around the Android world, so it seems to be constantly on the alert, writes ZD Net.
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