Tag Archive for: bandits

U.K. Arrest in ‘SMS Bandits’ Phishing Service


Authorities in the United Kingdom have arrested a 20-year-old man for allegedly operating an online service for sending high-volume phishing campaigns via mobile text messages. The service, marketed in the underground under the name “SMS Bandits,” has been responsible for blasting out huge volumes of phishing lures spoofing everything from COVID-19 pandemic relief efforts to PayPal, telecommunications providers and tax revenue agencies.

The U.K.’s National Crime Agency (NCA) declined to name the suspect, but confirmed that the Metropolitan Police Service’s cyber crime unit had detained an individual from Birmingham in connection to a business that supplied “criminal services related to phishing offenses.”

The proprietors of the phishing service were variously known on cybercrime forums under handles such as SMSBandits, “Gmuni,” “Bamit9,” and “Uncle Munis.” SMS Bandits offered an SMS phishing (a.k.a. “smishing”) service for the mass sending of text messages designed to phish account credentials for different popular websites and steal personal and financial data for resale.

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Sasha Angus is a partner at Scylla Intel, a cyber intelligence startup that did a great deal of research into the SMS Bandits leading up to the arrest. Angus said the phishing lures sent by the SMS Bandits were unusually well-done and free of grammar and spelling mistakes that often make it easy to spot a phony message.

“Just by virtue of these guys being native English speakers, the quality of their phishing kits and lures were considerably better than most,” Angus said.

According to Scylla, the SMS Bandits made a number of operational security (or “opsec”) mistakes that made it relatively easy to find out who they were in real life, but the technical side SMS Bandits’ operation was rather advanced.

“They were launching fairly high-volume smishing campaigns from SMS gateways, but overall their opsec was fairly lousy,” Angus said. “But on the telecom front they were using fairly sophisticated tactics.”

The proprietor of the SMS Bandits, telling the world he lives in Birmingham.

For example, the SMS Bandits automated systems to check…

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Fiber bandits: FBI hunting serial fiber-cutting vandals in California

AT&T recently announced a $ 250,000 reward to anyone with information on whoever entered its underground facilities in Livermore, California – a San Francisco suburb – and severed two of its fiber cables earlier this week, USA Today reported yesterday.

The vandalism echoes 14 similar attacks that have destroyed damaged fiber cables and disrupted internet service for customers of several service providers in the northern California region dating back to July 2014.

USA Today also reported a similar attack in late June, when “someone broke into an underground vault and cut three fiber-optic cables belonging to Colorado-based service providers Level 3 and Zayo,” according to an earlier USA Today report. The FBI confirmed at the time that it was investigating connections between that attack and 11 similar outages in the region over the year prior. 

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Network World Colin Neagle