RedZei Chinese Scammers Targeting Chinese Students in the U.K.

Chinese international students in the U.K. have been targeted by persistent Chinese-speaking scammers for over a year as part of an activity dubbed RedZei aka RedThief. "The RedZei fraudsters have chosen their targets carefully, researched them and realized it was a rich victim group that is ripe...

FCC moves to block robotexts

The American people are fed up with scam texts, and we need to use every tool we have to do something about it. This is what Jessica Rosenworcel, Chairwoman of the US Federal Communications Commission FCC said after releasing a plan that will require mobile carriers to block "robotext" text...

Spanish Police Arrest SIM Swappers Who Stole Money from Victims Bank Accounts

Spain's National Police Agency, the Policía Nacional, said last week it dismantled an unnamed cybercriminal organization and arrested eight individuals in connection with a series of SIM swapping attacks that were carried out with the goal of financial fraud. The suspects of the crime ring...

Sharp SIM-Swapping Spike Causes $68M in Losses

SIM-swapping – the practice of duping mobile carriers into switching a target’s phone services to an attacker-controlled phone – is on the rise, the Feds are warning – leading to millions in losses for consumers who found their bank accounts drained and other accounts taken over. Subscriber...

Lawmakers Prod FCC to Act on SIM Swapping

Crooks have stolen tens of millions of dollars and other valuable commodities from thousands of consumers via "SIM swapping," a particularly invasive form of fraud that involves tricking a target's mobile carrier into transferring someone's wireless service to a device they control. But the U.S...

TrickBot adds new trick to its arsenal: tampering with trusted texts

Researchers from Dell Secureworks saw a new feature in TrickBot that allows it to tamper with the web sessions of users who have certain mobile carriers. According to a blog post that they published early last week, TrickBot can do this by "intercepting network traffic before it is rendered by a...

TrickBot Targets Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint Users to Siphon PINs

The TrickBot malware, known previously for targeting U.S. banks, is now setting a bullseye on users of U.S.-based mobile carriers, including Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile and Sprint, to launch SIM swapping attacks. Researchers with Dell’s Secureworks research team warned that they have observed the...

The Rise of “Bulletproof” Residential Networks

Cybercrooks increasingly are anonymizing their malicious traffic by routing it through residential broadband and wireless data connections. Traditionally, those connections have been mainly hacked computers, mobile phones, or home routers. But this story is about so-called "bulletproof residentia...

China’s BGP rerouting leaves European mobile carriers stranded for 2 hours

By Uzair Amir On Thursday, June 6th 9:43 am UTC, Europe’s leading mobile providers received a shock when a large chunk of the traffic destined to reach them was misdirected or rerouted to another path by the network of a Chinese state-operated telecom firm, China Telecom. The misdirection of the...

Cisco Service Provider, WebEx Bugs Offer Up Remote Code Execution

Cisco is warning of critical remote code-execution RCE vulnerabilities in the Cisco Prime Infrastructure PI and Evolved Programmable Network EPN Manager, which is used by telcos, mobile carriers, cable companies and ISPs to manage their hardware infrastructure. The vendor also issued estimated...

Never Forget That You Are Being Watched

By David Balaban What data do Facebook, Google, and mobile apps collect, do mobile carriers listen to your calls? Read this post and find answers to these and other privacy questions as well as get tips on how to protect your personal data. It has become known that information about 257,000...

U.S. Mobile Giants Want to be Your Online Identity

The four major U.S. wireless carriers today detailed a new initiative that may soon let Web sites eschew passwords and instead authenticate visitors by leveraging data elements unique to each customer's phone and mobile subscriber account, such as location, customer reputation, and physical...

Privacy Advocates Say Kelsey Smith Act Gives Police Too Much Power

The delicate balancing act between security and privacy is once again being tested. A bill making its way through Congress seeks to allow law enforcement to more easily uncover location data for cell phones from mobile carriers. The Kelsey Smith Act H.R. 5983 and S. 2973 would allow police and...

Tracking Firm LocationSmart Leaked Location Data for Customers of All Major U.S. Mobile Carriers Without Consent in Real Time Via Its Web Site

LocationSmart, a U.S. based company that acts as an aggregator of real-time data about the precise location of mobile phone devices, has been leaking this information to anyone via a buggy component of its Web site -- without the need for any password or other form of authentication or...

Chris Soghoian on Wireless Carriers and Android Security

youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzoACtJk3sI&hl=enUS&version=3 Chris Soghoian of the ACLU discusses the looming crisis of mobile security caused by the failure of mobile carriers to push Android updates to users at the Kaspersky Lab Security Analyst Summit Monday...