And I don’t mean friends texting you porkies about the size of the perch they caught this morning. Security firm McAfee has warned of a new trend for ’smishing’, in which nefarious scamsters send you texts trying to get you to visit their website on your PC, which can then be infected with a trojan virus.
The name is a conflation of SMS and ‘phishing’, which is the word used to describe this sort of thing on email (for example when people pretend to be your bank to get you to give them personal details).
It’s already happened in Iceland and Australia, and McAfee’s Jimmy Shah says there’s just been another mass attack aimed at Spanish mobile users. “The genie is out of the bottle with regard to smishing,” he says. “We’re bound to see a rise in the numbers of smishing attempts in the coming months.”
Gulp.
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