Cybercriminals Have a Weird New Way to Target You with Scam Texts

wired.com

13 pointsjaredwiener2 comments

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.

How many phones still support 2G? If its a lot I suspect a security patch or firmware update could fix that. They do link to this [1] for Android, a setting I do have.

They then push the scam messages, which contain links to fraudulent websites, to the connected phones

Seems like disabling non-HTTPS could also be done through an update. Plenty of scammer sites have legit DV certs though.

[1] - https://source.android.com/docs/security/features/cellular-s...

2G is still required in quite a few areas, but it would probably be a good idea to change the default to 3G/4G only; not being able to use a new phone would be a problem while changing a setting during setup would not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com