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      Ongoing scam tricks kids playing Roblox and Fortnite

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 15 August, 2023 - 20:57 · 1 minute

    Ongoing scam tricks kids playing Roblox and Fortnite

    Enlarge (credit: Savusia Konstantin | Getty Images )

    Thousands of websites belonging to US government agencies, leading universities, and professional organizations have been hijacked over the last half decade and used to push scammy offers and promotions, new research has found. Many of these scams are aimed at children and attempt to trick them into downloading apps, malware, or submitting personal details in exchange for nonexistent rewards in Fortnite and Roblox .

    For more than three years, security researcher Zach Edwards has been tracking these website hijackings and scams. He says the activity can be linked back to the activities of affiliate users of one advertising company. The US-registered company acts as a service that sends web traffic to a range of online advertisers, allowing individuals to sign up and use its systems. However, on any given day, Edwards, a senior manager of threat insights at Human Security , uncovers scores of .gov, .org, and .edu domains being compromised.

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    “This group is what I would consider to be the number one group at bulk compromising infrastructure across the Internet and hosting scams on it and other types of exploits,” Edwards says. The scale of the website compromises—which are ongoing—and the public nature of the scams makes them stand out, the researcher says.

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      Hundreds of scam apps hit over 10 million Android devices

      WIRED · news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Saturday, 2 October, 2021 - 10:50 · 1 minute

    Never put a GriftHorse on your phone.

    Enlarge / Never put a GriftHorse on your phone. (credit: John Lamparsky | Getty Images)

    Google has taken increasingly sophisticated steps to keep malicious apps out of Google Play. But a new round of takedowns involving about 200 apps and more than 10 million potential victims shows that this longtime problem remains far from solved—and in this case, potentially cost users hundreds of millions of dollars.

    Researchers from the mobile security firm Zimperium say the massive scamming campaign has plagued Android since November 2020. As is often the case, the attackers were able to sneak benign-looking apps like "Handy Translator Pro," "Heart Rate and Pulse Tracker," and “Bus - Metrolis 2021” into Google Play as fronts for something more sinister. After downloading one of the malicious apps, a victim would receive a flood of notifications, five an hour, that prompted them to "confirm" their phone number to claim a prize. The “prize” claim page loaded through an in-app browser, a common technique for keeping malicious indicators out of the code of the app itself. Once a user entered their digits, the attackers signed them up for a monthly recurring charge of about $42 through the premium SMS services feature of wireless bills. It's a mechanism that normally lets you pay for digital services or, say, send money to a charity via text message. In this case, it went directly to crooks.

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    The techniques are common in malicious Play Store apps, and premium SMS fraud in particular is a notorious issue. But the researchers say it's significant that attackers were able to string these known approaches together in a way that was still extremely effective—and in staggering numbers—even as Google has continuously improved its Android security and Play Store defenses.

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