It’s Worryingly Easy To Spam Fake Government Coronavirus Warnings Direct To Populations’ Phones

Two At 2 Million Guinea Pigs And Counting: The Remarkable Rise Of Self-Monitoring In The Time Of Coronavirus

Monteiro was able to create these spoof messages because of long-known shortcomings in the text message protocol—SMS. It’s problematic from a security standpoint, as there’s no way to verify the identity of the sender. Tools like WhatsApp check the sender ID by looking at whether they have an encryption key that only the real person should own. If the sender doesn’t have that key, they’re an impostor.

Even email, that now ancient-seeming messaging tool, has ways of checking a sender’s legitimacy. For instance, there’s a protection known as DomainKeys Identified Mail . When used, the sender signs an email with a digital signature. This proves it came from the true domain from which it appears to have been sent. Again, this is done using encryption keys.SMS doesn’t have any such checks. As Monteiro bluntly puts it, “There is no standard for securing sender identities.

The U.K. government has put in some protections, but they’re limited. For instance, it has managed to have telco companies filter texts that come from UK_GOV and UKGOV so they can only come from official channels. As Monteiro showed, it was easy to create other believable sender names. “Arguably, the issue is not that spoofing is easy, but that identifying a legitimate message is inherently hard,” he tellsWhilst the U.K.

Not that the U.K. is alone. The same goes for any other nation using SMS for mass alerts. If you do receive a COVID-19 message appearing to come from your government, it might be best to avoid clicking on any links within. Instead, search for official sources of information online, such as gov.uk/coronavirus.

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