Google Android end users have been pestered very last 7 days by a series of fake notifications popping up on their devices.
In accordance to Paul Ducklin of Naked Security by Sophos’, the string of phony popups to start with became an annoyance for end users of the Google Hangouts app ahead of bothering buyers of Microsoft Teams.
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“Users all over the planet, and therefore at all moments of working day (lots of buyers complained of becoming woken up unnecessarily), been given spammy seeking messages,” wrote Ducklin in a website article printed on August 28.
“To be crystal clear, it was not Microsoft screening notifications in the Groups app for Android. The bogus alerts caught the application large off guard, much too.”
From their written content, the notifications really don’t show up to be malicious or felony in intent. No dubious back links or calls to motion had been bundled, with messages just stating the header “FCM Messages” adopted by the textual content “Examination Notification!!!!”
Pondering the id of the sender and their motive, Ducklin commented: “The messages did indeed appear like some kind of test—but by whom, and for what objective?
“The 4 exclamation points proposed someone of a hackerish persuasion—perhaps some form of overcooked ‘proof of concept’ (PoC) aimed at making a level, sent out by another person who lacked the social grace or the legalistic sensitivity of understanding when to cease.”
Ducklin suggests that the spate of bogus notifications could be connected to a latest discovery designed by a cybersecurity researcher and bug bounty hunter contacting themself “Abbs.” On August 17, Abbs claimed to have earned $30K for identifying a coding vulnerability in numerous Android applications that could enable anyone to highjack the Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) company.
Describing the weak point, Abbs exclaimed: “A destructive attacker could management the articles of thrust notifications to any software that operates the FCM SDK and has its FCM server crucial uncovered, and at the exact same time send these notifications to every one user of the susceptible software!
“These notifications could comprise anything at all the attacker would like which include graphic/disturbing photos (by using the ‘image’: ‘url-to-image’ attribute) accompanied with any demeaning or politically inclined message in the notification!”
The author of the notifications, which were being promptly halted by Google and Microsoft, has still to be identified.