The Center for Cybersecurity Belgium (CCB) has placed mobile phone security at the heart of its new awareness campaign in order to avoid “a virus pandemic targeting smartphones” while criminals and fraudsters still see it as a playground. more interesting to achieve their ends.
The campaign, titled “OK is not always OK!“, recommends, in the first place, to download applications only from official application stores (app stores).
“The risk of infecting your mobile phone is then already much lower., argued Tuesday the director of the CCB, Miguel De Bruycker, during the presentation of the campaign. To illustrate its recommendations, the Center for Cybersecurity returned to what it considers to be one of the most worrying cyberattacks of 2021, the Flubot virus. It had infected more than 11,000 smartphones in Belgium in just a few days. “Contaminated phones sent thousands of text messages without the knowledge of their owner. This is how the virus spread unnoticed to all the contacts of the victims”recalled Mr. De Bruycker.
While the number of infected devices might have been much higher, the consequences for users who fell victim to this malware were no less significant. “Whoever has access to your smartphone is actually accessing your life,” says De Bruycker. “For a malicious person, a smartphone is a very rewarding system because it is connected to the internet 24 hours a day, seven days a week”, once more notes the director of the CCB.
Beyond the recommendation to download only official apps, the Cyber Center advises to watch out for suspicious messages, not to ignore security alerts, to allow only minimal access to apps and to s ensure that your smartphone and its applications are always up to date. This campaign was developed in collaboration with the CyberSecurity Coalition, a partnership between actors from the academic world, public services and private companies.
