Science and technology brought great inventions to the life of people, such as smartphones, which are the largest communication gadget throughout the whole globe. Meanwhile, the software development industry created masses of different applications and programmes that help to exchange with data, like mail services and messengers. Unfortunately, besides obvious benefits, this transmission dimension has a quite irritative nuance in the form of spam. Everybody familiar with unwelcome messages with different advertising, or, even worse, containing malware, that leads to serious troubles. There also many annoying and unsolicited calls are spread around the spam practice.
In this article, we are going to make a brief review of three effective applications against the above-mentioned problem. The first one will be about messages with suspicious links, the second one is about the application for unwanted calls suppression, and the third one regards spamming via email.
Messenger protection
There are different channels of spamming: emails, SMS, messages income, phone calls. Speaking of those channels which include letters/messages to users inbox, there is such type of spam as shady links. It is the form of spam where the message contains credibility looking link. But as a matter of fact, there is one spy character that actually allows hackers to lead you to infected link. This method is known as Internationalized domain name (IDN) homograph attack. The trick here is about replacing one Latin symbol by symbol from other alphabets, like Cyrillic. For instance, letters “a” looks exactly the same in both alphabets:
WhatsApp (https://www.whatsapp.com) is currently testing its new anti-spam feature that recognizes homographs. It doesn't block incoming messages, but indicate that it may be infected. So the user is warned about a potential thread.
Phone Calls Defender
Meanwhile, there is a ready-made application that allows managing incoming calls. Callhound (https://callhoundapp.com) is an anti-spam app developed by Redwerk company. There are dozens of bothersome calls people receive from advertising agents, or support centers of companies or even some bots. Callhound was developed to solve this problem. By applying filtering rules users can define what numbers to block so unsolicited calls don’t occur, and which one to mark as unwanted and in this case, when a user receives a call there is a proper record on the screen appears and he can decide to answer or not. The application has an intuitively understandable interface and easy in use. It includes cloud backup storage so data loss is prevented. Or, if the user changes device, all the information is automatically transferred via account authorization. The application is compatible with Android and iOS platforms. Available on Google Play and App Store.
E-mails Guard
Probably, email messaging is one of the first spam channels. Still, there is no inbuilt panacea in mail services founded. Hence, people have to use additional applications that let them administrate mailbox in such a manner which protect them from spam letters. Fortunately, there are quite many apps that help to handle this issue. One of them is a SpamTitan Email Anti-Spam app (https://www.spamtitan.com). It allows to avoid malicious dispatches via creating proper blacklists. This tool scans suspicious content, attachments that are likely to bear a threat to the user's device. Just like in Callhound application, here an option of a whitelist is also envisaged. By using filtering capabilities, you can easily mark all senders whose correspondence is unwanted to be received. This is a simple and effective solution to combat viruses and phishing attempts, as well as to get rid of annoying advertisements announcements.
Spam attackers constantly find new ways of how to reach users’ devices. And they succeed in this matter. On the other hand, security software development also keeps its hand on the pulse and create proper protection measures. So, it is reasonable to upgrade your security system, as an unsolicited advertisement is just the least of the evil. Malware connections can lead to a breach of personal data, which can bring serious material and even moral losses.
