Spammers Use Tool to Harvest Phone Numbers

SMS spam has become a serious issue, but have you ever wondered how the spammers obtain the phone numbers they send their malicious messages to?

According to experts from security firm Webroot, the crooks have a tool that crawls the public Internet in search for mobile phone numbers.

A new version of a well-known phone number harvesting tool has been released these days. The new variant is capable of collecting not only phone numbers, but also the owner’s name, the name of the mobile operator, date and the country of origin.

This particular tool is designed to target numbers from Russia and Ukraine, but it’s likely that such applications are utilized by cybercriminals to harvest data from all over the world.

In order to protect your phone number against such tools, be sure to post it only on websites that offer security mechanisms against automatic information harvesting.

Check out the gallery below to see what the tool looks like.