From the afternoon hours of Tuesday, thousands of mobile users in United States received spam text from their phone numbers.
And telecom company Verizon Wireless was forced to issue a public statement that some threat actors might have taken control of its servers to send spam to its users and diverting them to Russian state media network Channel One.
Verizon, however, condemned the speculation that the spam was being delivered from the Putin led nation as it was still investigating the incident.
Initially, it seemed like threat actors were seen controlling the telecom servers to send spam. But as soon as they embedded the link to Channel One, security researchers suspected that Kremlin could have triggered the attack.
At the end of last week, US President issued a nationwide warning that Russian hackers could infiltrate the nation’s critical network to create unnecessary chaos. He asked all the technology CEOs, and the business heads to bolster their in-house cybersecurity measures to mitigate the cyber risks emerging from Moscow.
Cyber Attack on Verizon’s network and generating spam from the users’ own phone numbers needs a lot of technical expertise of international standards. And so, security experts believe it could be a highly sophisticated phishing attack launched by a foreign nation.
Interestingly, just a few weeks ago, Verizon proudly announced that it has developed a tool that intercepts the spam texts at its servers, before they are delivered. And still if they reach the customer, it is urging its customers to forward them to 7726 spam number from their mobile phones and is free.
By doing so, customers can help the telecom service provider to block spam text messages to core.
As per the official statistics released by the company, it has till date blocked over 12 billion spam messages and 80 million robocalls from the year June 2019-January 2022.
