Last Updated on 03/12/2021 by Riya
The National Cyber Security Center of Finland has raised a “red alert” to notify about a widespread operation aimed at infecting Android users with the Flubot banking malware, which is spread via SMS sent from hacked smartphones.
This is Finland’s second big Flubot operation of this year, with a prior set of cyberattacks SMS flooding thousands of Peoples each day from early June to mid-August 2021. The current spam attempt, like the last one during the summer, possesses a voicemail concept, encouraging the recipients to click on an URL that will let them listen to a voicemail message from the mobile carrier.
Rather than receiving a voicemail, SMS victims are led to infected sites that will force APK installers to insert the Flubot banking malware on their Android phones. On the other hand, victims with iPhones or other mobile phones will be sent to different fake and potentially harmful sites, including phishing web pages that will steal victims’ credit card credentials. In a Friday notice, the Finnish National Cyber Security Centre disclosed,
“70k messages have been sent within last 24 hours, following our current figure. If the ongoing operation is as relentless as the one from the summer, we can predict hundreds of thousands of SMS in the following days. So far there have been numerous proven incidents of hacked phones.”
It is recommended that Android users who get Flubot spam texts do not click the contained URLs or download the files given with the URL to their android devices.
