RoboKA: KAN Informed Multimodal Learning for RoboCall Surveillance System

Wide exploration on robocall surveillance research is hindered due to limited access to public datasets, due to privacy concerns. In this work, we first curate Robo-SAr, a synthetic robocall dataset designed for robocall surveillance research. Robo-SAr comprises of 200 unwanted and 1200 legitimat...

Watch out for tax-season robocalls pushing fake “relief programs”

While Americans are sorting through paperwork to get their taxes filed in time, scammers are working overtime to grab a piece of the action. As tax season ramps up, so does scam activity. Our telemetry shows a spike in robocalls impersonating tax resolution firms, tax relief agencies, and vaguely...

Scam Guard for desktop: A second set of eyes for suspicious moments

Scams aren’t so obvious anymore. They're well-written, have working grammar, and can lead victims to very convincing branded webpages. Scammers increasingly use AI tools to clone sites and create highly sophisticated scams at scale, so don't expect to rely on spotting obvious typos anymore. That’...

“No place in our networks”: FCC hangs up on thousands of voice operators in robocall war

Everyone hates robocalls. However, it's difficult to track down all the scammers and spammers that make them, so the Federal Communications Commission FCC has taken another approach: it just disconnected over a thousand voice operators from the public telephone network for not doing their part to...

How to avoid election related scams

With the US election campaigns at full throttle, scammers have taken a renewed interest in the ways this can be used to defraud people, often using the same tactics legitimate campaigns leverage for support emails, text messages, phone calls, and social media pleas. The lure that we have seen the...

AI-generated voices in robocalls are illegal, rules FCC

The Federal Communications Commission FCC has announced that calls made with voices generated with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI will be considered “artificial” under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act TCPA. Effective immediately, that makes robocalls that implement voice cloning...

DOJ Slams XCast with $10 Million Fine Over Massive Illegal Robocall Operation

The U.S. Department of Justice DoJ on Tuesday said it reached a settlement with VoIP service provider XCast over allegations that it facilitated illegal telemarketing campaigns since at least January 2018, in contravention of the Telemarketing Sales Rule TSR. In addition to prohibiting the compan...

A week in security (August 7 - August 13)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: Zoom clarifies user consent requirement when training its AI Several hospitals still counting the cost of widespread ransomware attack Old exploit kits still kicking around in 2023 YouTube makes sweeping changes to tackle spam on Shorts videos Googles "browse...

Here’s Why You’re Still Stuck in Robocall Hell

Despite major progress fighting spam and scams, the roots of the problem go far deeper than your phone company’s defenses...

A week in security (May 30 – June 5)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: Intuit phish says "We have put a temporary hold on your account" The Quad commits to strengthening cybersecurity in software, supply chains Double-whammy attack follows fake Covid alert with a bogus bank call Microsoft Office zero-day "Follina"—its not a bug, its a...

The Fight Against Robocall Spam and Scams Heats Up in India

A new proposal by India's telecom regulator aims to make accurate caller ID mandatory, but critics say it may be fundamentally flawed...

More than a quarter of Americans fell for robocall scam calls in past year

More and more Americans have been falling victim to phone scams since 2019. According to the latest report from Truecaller Google Docs upload of the entire report, separate blog here, a known spam blocker and caller ID app, 68.4 million Americans were victimized in the last 12 months, a substanti...

Call Center Provider Experiences Major Data Leak

By Habiba Rashid The exposed data was being updated in realtime with new logs while 1.48 million robocall logs were accessed by researchers initially. This is a post from HackRead.com Read the original post: Call Center Provider Experiences Major Data Leak...

Robocall Results from a Telephony Honeypot

A group of researchers set up a telephony honeypot and tracked robocall behavior: NCSU researchers said they ran 66,606 telephone lines between March 2019 and January 2020, during which time they said to have received 1,481,201 unsolicited calls -- even if they never made their phone numbers publ...

Here are the most popular robocall scams and how to avoid them

We recently examined how robocall scams are a serious threat to privacy, alongside the astonishing rate at which their volume continues to increase. Forty-three billion calls in 2019 with an average of 131 calls per person in the US alone is not something to be sniffed at. No matter how careful y...

A week in security (October 21 – 27)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs, we explored a link between Magecart Group 5 and the Carbanak APT, we discussed the growing rate of robocalls threatening user privacy, and we tipped you off on how to protect yourself from doxing. We were glad to see the BBC raise awareness about stalkerware, much...

A week in security (August 5 – 11)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs, we explained how brain-machine interface BMI technology could usher in a world of Internet of Thoughts, why having backdoors is problematic, and how we can improve the security of our smart homes. To cap off Hacker Summer Camp week, the Labs team released a special...

The null choice. A social engineering example in the wild

With social engineering there are lots of ways to get what you want, depending on the circumstance of course. The null choice is one that works really well when your desired outcome isn't obvious to the people you're trying to dupe. There are ways and means of overcoming a null choice scenario...

The FCC's Robocall Plan Sounds Awfully Familiar

FCC chairman Ajit Pai has proposed a set of rules to combat robocalls. Don't get your hopes up quite yet...

The Robocall Crisis Will Never Be Totally Fixed

Believe it or not, the robocall crisis has stabilized. But like email spam, it's never going to go away entirely...