According to a new report, many criminal hackers have started targeting smartphones and there are a lot of threats like password-hacking machines and threats for hire are emerging. The FBI is warning smartphone users to use secret codes to protect themselves as hackers are using several smartphone farms to carry out iPhone-on-iPhone and Android-on-Android attacks. Recently, a Lucid threat group which is behind 100,000 phishing attacks daily has also deployed smartphone farms for their attacks.
Attackers use phishing campaigns to attack your smartphones like sending you an SMS that your account has been compromised or notifying you about some payment you have to make. These types of messages have become much more convincing after the rise of AI tools because they can easily impersonate specific brands and their styles. So, now it is very hard for people to actually tell these phishing messages apart from the original messages which makes it easy for hackers to attack your smartphones.
You must have wondered how these attacks happen and how the attackers know which users to target by sending them messages that can easily hack their smartphones. According to a new report by The Prodaft Catalyst cyber intelligence portal, Lucid is targeting 88 countries with a subscription-based service aimed at harvesting credit card data. The Chinese phishing-as-a-service-based platform is using Android’s RCS and Apple iMessage to bypass traditional SMS spam filters to boost delivery and success rates. Lucid's smartphone farms send at least 100,000 messages to victims every day.
Now arises the question of what even a smartphone farm is. Simply put, smartphone farms are the locations where large numbers of connected Android and iPhone devices are used to automate tasks on a large scale. Smartphone farms can be employed for legitimate purposes like inflating reviews or advertising and can be used for malicious activities like malware and phishing attacks as well. The Lucid platform is using smartphone farms to send phishing messages to harvest credit card details and the platform is also using mobile device emulators to coordinate scam operations. As the scale of these attacks carried out by Lucid is massive, it is very concerning. The group behind these attacks known as XinXin is using user-agent filtering and IP blocking to not let themselves get detected and they are also selling their platform through Telegram which already has 2000 members.
Read next: 44% of Americans Want To Delete Personal Data Due To Fears of Cybersecurity and Online Threats, New Study Shows
Attackers use phishing campaigns to attack your smartphones like sending you an SMS that your account has been compromised or notifying you about some payment you have to make. These types of messages have become much more convincing after the rise of AI tools because they can easily impersonate specific brands and their styles. So, now it is very hard for people to actually tell these phishing messages apart from the original messages which makes it easy for hackers to attack your smartphones.
You must have wondered how these attacks happen and how the attackers know which users to target by sending them messages that can easily hack their smartphones. According to a new report by The Prodaft Catalyst cyber intelligence portal, Lucid is targeting 88 countries with a subscription-based service aimed at harvesting credit card data. The Chinese phishing-as-a-service-based platform is using Android’s RCS and Apple iMessage to bypass traditional SMS spam filters to boost delivery and success rates. Lucid's smartphone farms send at least 100,000 messages to victims every day.
Now arises the question of what even a smartphone farm is. Simply put, smartphone farms are the locations where large numbers of connected Android and iPhone devices are used to automate tasks on a large scale. Smartphone farms can be employed for legitimate purposes like inflating reviews or advertising and can be used for malicious activities like malware and phishing attacks as well. The Lucid platform is using smartphone farms to send phishing messages to harvest credit card details and the platform is also using mobile device emulators to coordinate scam operations. As the scale of these attacks carried out by Lucid is massive, it is very concerning. The group behind these attacks known as XinXin is using user-agent filtering and IP blocking to not let themselves get detected and they are also selling their platform through Telegram which already has 2000 members.
Read next: 44% of Americans Want To Delete Personal Data Due To Fears of Cybersecurity and Online Threats, New Study Shows
