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Four out of ten Norwegians have been the target of fraud attempts through fake SMS messages, according to Norsis.
Telenor, Norsis and Nkom warn of many fraudulent SMS messages. The picture shows a fraud attempt from 2015, when rogue players intended to send a message from Nordea.
Heiko Junge / NTB scanpix
Published:
37 percent of all Norwegians have been exposed to fake text messages
senders during the last year.
It arises from a survey conducted by Yougov on behalf of the Norwegian Center for Information Security (Norsis).
– We must learn not to blindly trust who appears as the sender of a
SMS. Very few are aware that it is almost as easy to send a fake SMS as a real one, says cyber expert and senior advisor Vidar Sandland at Norsis in a press release.
The National Communications Authority (Nkom) also claims that Telenor blocked 45,000 text messages related to the fraud on one day in August.
According to Nkom, there may be several fraudulent techniques that cause the message to stop, where the fake sender, the so-called SMS spoofing, is one of them.
– It is a challenge. Nkom works to ensure that people have confidence in identifiers such as
It is used in electronic communications and works both domestically and internationally to reduce SMS spoofing. However, the players who do this are often outside of Norway, says senior advisor Johannes Vallesverd at Nkom.
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Most vulnerable Android
A total of about 20 million text messages went through Telenor’s system this August day, according to Norsis.
Fake text messages are primarily used to mislead the recipient’s username, password, or credit card information.
Both Sandland and the expert at Nkom believe that the high level of confidence we have in the fact that text messages are genuine means that fraudulent SMS will become more common and more advanced.
– You may also be asked to download a program that, in the worst case, gives criminals full access to your camera, microphone, files, and text messages. It’s only the imagination that puts an end to the use of this, says Sandland.
It emphasizes that downloading this type of monitoring app is in most cases a challenge associated with Android phones. Apple phones do not accept application downloads outside of their own distribution platform, unlike Android phones.
– We also see more advanced usage where texting is used as part of social manipulation. A fake text message that appears to be from the boss is sent to a finance clerk asking him to make a payment, Sandland says.
He also cites an example where fake text messages have been used to give criminals physical access to a workplace.
– A manager told the person at the front desk that someone would come and they should let him in.
Fake text messages often play on temptations or fear that the recipient will join in the scam.
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It is not the link that is dangerous
Fake text messages may have a sender number that you know, it may be companies like the Norwegian Health Directorate, a supermarket chain, the Norwegian Post, the Tax Administration or others, possibly an unknown mobile number.
Unlike email fraud, the actual link in an SMS is a short link which makes fraud even more difficult to detect.
If you hover your mouse over a link in an email, you can often see the full address of the page that it is being sent to. In a text message, you don’t have the same opportunity for this, Sandland explains.
According to Norsis senior advisor, there is really only one sure way to avoid being scammed by a fake SMS.
– Serious gamers will never ask you to pay for anything or provide personal information through a link in an SMS. It is also important to remember that clicking the link is not dangerous. It’s when you later provide information or agree to download a program that you can run into serious trouble, says Sandland.
On behalf of the Ministry of Justice and Emergency Preparedness, Norsis is now hosting National Security Month this fall.
One of the objectives of the campaign is for as many Norwegian companies as possible to carry out a training program among their employees that better empowers them to protect the values of the workplace.
Seeing through an attempted email or SMS fraud is one of several learning points in the e-learning course.
The survey was conducted by the YouGov research institute. In weeks 26-27, a total of 1,507 CAWI interviews were conducted on a nationally representative sample comprised of individuals ages 15-74.
