Monday, March 16, 2015

Another (possible) scam, targetting androids

So there I was the other day, doing my daily browse of junk on Facebook, when I saw one of those random links that you just KNOW are filled with clutter, are absurdly difficult to navigate, and are in general questionable anyways. But... it was auto-correct fails! Those are always good for a laugh.

So I clicked on the link. It then pulled up some window telling me that my android was out of date, and to simply click on the button to get my android updated. This makes me wish I had a way to point my phone to my laptop as a proxy, or had rooted my phone and put some kind of linux distro on it, but alas, I couldn't dig into the scam.

Anyways, being the paranoid security professional I am, I closed out of that window, went into my phone's built in update methods, and it said no updates are available. Interesting. To be fair, my phone IS running a less than current version of android, but clearly an update has not been released for my model of phone. You would never EVER get phone updates through a link you clicked on in your Facebook app, however.

It all looked very official though, with that little green android dude and whatnot. Makes me want to start a project to see about a virtualized phone or a security research phone or something along those lines.

Keep an eye out, folks! Stay safe, and don't click on suspicious things, even on or especially on your phones/tablets!