Just got to know that someone received a text from me that I didn't send, what am I supposed to do now?

728    Asked by AnkitChauhan in Cyber Security , Asked on Feb 25, 2022

Does the text my friend received from my number imply one of us has a virus? I'm concerned this is the case because either a virus on my phone sent spam text to the friend I contact the most, or a virus on my friend's phone brought up spam text. 


If it does imply one of us has a virus as I suspect, is there a way to tell who, or do we each need to take antivirus cleanup measures? We both have Android phones and I think the same carrier but different phone models and 1OS versions. We both have antivirus on our phones (WebRoot on my end, Norton on my friend's) and scans came back clean.

Answered by Anisha Dalal

There are two possible scenarios for someone receiving a text from me that I didn't send : There is a virus on the sender's phone, or the SMS was spoofed, as per the SMS Spoofing link in your post. I think the most likely scenario is that there is a virus on your phone that WebRoot is not able to detect. A good way to check is to ask some of your other contacts to see if they have received a similar text. If this were a virus, I would expect your other contacts to have received similar messages.


If this was done via SMS spoofing, this implies that whoever was trying to compromise the receiver's phone knew that the two of you had a pre-existing relationship, assuming they weren't just spoofing random numbers. This would imply a targeted attack.



Your Answer

Interviews

Parent Categories