Suspicious MMS attachment in my Text? Am I infected?

[averagejoe72]

Hello,
this morning I received suspicious text messages from 2 different people.

They all look like this:

Message size: 1KB
Expires: 12:10 PM, Oct 20
[ DOWNLOAD BUTTON ]
7:29 AM MMS

The people that (supposedly) sent them were both friends that I frequently text with. They both use iPhones. They both send attachments occasionally, which seem to rarely work.

I clicked download to see what I assumed were pics of our kids, and the download button lit up and appeared to try downloading, but nothing happened.

I texted both friends after this hiccup, and neither actually sent me a text message! Gulp!

Now I am worried that I am infected with something? Or maybe they are infected? I have googled "MMS malware" and seen a lot of scary stuff.

I use a Samsung Galaxy Note 3 running Android version 5.0 with an "Android security patch level" of 2016-09-01.

Please Help!

 

[treetopsranch]

When I get a suspicious email from a friend, I always ask them if they really sent that to me. Most times they say no, so I just delete it prior to opening it. Remember, email addresses can be spoofed so you think it's from a friend but it's really from a hacker. Usually they misspell words and use bad grammar in the subject field which is a good tip off.

Nobody is going to know if you are now infected. Just use a virus checker.

 

[Rukbat]

1. There is a lot of malware that can be sent by MMS. Next time, text them first. If they didn't send it, delete it.

2. You probably didn't get infected, but you can run an antivirus app and Malwarebytes Anti-Malware.

 

[averagejoe72]

Antivirus, huh? For some reason I thought it didn't work right for mobile (and was not recommended)... ok, good to know.

How likely is it to detect if I have something? Is the state-of-the-art anti-virus as good on Android as it is on PCs?

And yeah, I never open anything in email that looks suspicious, but I didn't know texts were also vulnerable. Hopefully I can find a way to outright block all text attachments. Id rather not even be tempted...

Thanks for the replies!

 

[averagejoe72]

Also, how could it spoof people from my contact list?

If an attachment was not from a friend I would have never opened it....

 

[zledzhydro]

ahh an infected phone

 

[nebilex]

Hi OP,
Did you ever get the issue resolved. I recently switched from iphone to android (Samsung S7 edge) and started receiving these messages. I've clicked on a couple of them but nothing happened so i stopped clicking on them. But now i get these messages and when i don't click on it, it automatically goes away from my message box. I'm downloading malwarebyte now to see if it's something that could fix in case i downloaded anything but for now it's only been messages.

thanks

 

[nahoku]

Also, how could it spoof people from my contact list?

It's not spoofing "your" contact's list... your friend's contacts list is the one that got hacked, and not necessarily on their phone. Could be their email/account, their cloud back up, their social media accounts. How else would the hacker know about you and send you a message? Spoofing happens all the time on computers... Android now is no different.