Cryptocurrency Mining Malware Targets Australians via SMS

  • 5 November 2017
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November 5th, 2017  By Samuel Haig
 
Australians have increasingly become the target of an SMS-based bitcoin mining scam. The scam entices users with fictional free bitcoins that supposedly can be located at two shortened URLs; however, if visited, the USR will hijack that user’s computing power for the purpose of mining cryptocurrency on behalf of the scammers.


 
Nick Savvides, Chief Technology Officer at Symantec, has discussed the scam with Australian media outlet Nine, describing such as a “classic, hard sell, pump and dump type spam.”
 
Mr. Savvides states that the two links contained in the text messages take visitors to a site that “constantly asks you to sign up for their service. What the scammers are trying to do is trick you into handing over your CPU cycles so you can mine bitcoins for them. And in the process, they want you to hand over your personal information so they can use that to conduct further scams on you.”
 
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Userlevel 7
Good article caution to the wind for the user on this issue.

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