Mobile carriers are very slowly getting better at detecting and blocking scam texts, but it seems the fraudsters may still be staying ahead of the game.
Scammers are now using a technology known as SMS blasters, backpack-sized devices that can trick smartphones into thinking they are cell towers …
Scammers faking cell towers
Wired says the technology is not new, but there has been a marked increase in its use.
Over the last year, there has been a marked uptick in the use of so-called “SMS blasters” by scammers, with cops in multiple countries detecting and arresting people using the equipment. SMS blasters are small devices, which have been found in the back of criminals’ cars and sometimes backpacks, that impersonate cell phone towers and force phones into using insecure connections. They then push the scam messages, which contain links to fraudulent websites, to the connected phones.
The most powerful models can spam all phones in a radius of around 3,000 feet, and one blaster was used to send around 100,000 messages per hour.
Cybersecurity expert Cathal Mc Daid says that the devices work because phones can be instructed to drop to an older and far less secure mobile protocol. This is intended for use where 2G and 3G signals are stronger than 4G and 5G ones, but is being exploited by scammers.
Phones near a blaster can be forced to connect to its illegitimate 4G signals, before the blaster pushes devices to downgrade to the less secure 2G signal. “The 2G fake base station is then used to send (blast) malicious SMSes to the mobile phones initially captured by the 4G false base station,” Mc Daid says.
Scammers can also spoof the sender to make it appear that the message came from a legitimate organization. As always, you should treat links with great suspicion unless you are specifically expecting a message.
Americans bad at spotting scams
The importance of this message is underlined by a study carried out by NordVPN. This found that Americans scored poorly in their ability to identify phishing scams, as CNET reports.
While the US did well overall in the privacy test, it flunked the phishing portion, with only 31% of respondents knowing how to spot phishing websites […] The low scores in the US compared poorly with other countries, including the UK, whose residents scored the highest marks in spotting phishing attempts.
The company theorizes that this may simply be fatigue from the sheer volume of these in the US.
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