SMSFactory: this Android malware that triples your bill

Malware abounds again and again, and new ones drive out old ones in new forms. Although certain signs may tell you that your phone is bugged, this is not always the case. The threats are insidious, we know it. There’s Russian malware that eavesdrops on your conversations, fake wallets that steal your crypto, and malware that siphons off your bank account without you realizing it. SMSFactory is one of them and it does havoc.

SMSFactory: quite a number!

Those are the security experts at AVAST who today warn against this malware that they have therefore named SMSFactory, the SMS factory ! Its name may already give you a clue as to how it works.

This virus takes fun to send messages through your device. But it’s not to wish your grandmother a happy birthday, no, but rather to premium rate numbers which seem to be part of a conversion system. Thus the money is paid directly to the pirate’s third-party account. Amount in dispute? 7 dollars (6.54€) per week, i.e. 336 dollars (313.81€) per year. If you pay attention to your bill, you should realize the problem from the first month with almost 30€ more than usual.

SMSFactory spares no one and has been seen on terminals all over the world, from Russia to Turkey via Ukraine, Spain, the United States or France. An improved version of the virus can even steal your contact list to spread even wider. It is also very easy to get hacked.

The sinner’s punishment!

To lure you into their nets, hackers use the principle of malvertising. They simply bombard numerous sites with advertisements to make you visit others containing malware payloads. Their preferred target? Sites offering pirate content in streaming or torrent, whether films, series or pornographic videos. You then find yourself on a page that invites you to download a file in the same theme as the site you were visiting before. So it can be an application for hacking games, watching adult content, free video streaming or others. Once installed on your phone, you will quickly find that the app does not work very well, if at all. However, the damage is done and the Trojan is already warm in your smartphone. Where the application is strong is that it does everything to be discreet. Already, her icon is empty and she can erase her presence on the home screen. Even stronger, it has no name. So when you look at the list of programs installed on your phone, it appears like this.

Difficult then to remove it, especially since you just might forget it. She, on the other hand, will not forget to puncture your account. However, there is a very simple trick to avoid this kind of misadventure, it is simply to ask your operator not to allow you to send premium SMS. Thus, each attempt to send will be blocked. The option is free and all operators offer it. You just need to activate it yourself in your customer area.

And there, it is the hacker who cries! (and then he rolls up his sleeves, gets back to work and finds another method).