Authorities in China said Monday that they would start looking into the increasing volume of text message spam that is being sent to consumers on their mobile phones.
China says they will investigate the massive amounts of mobile phone text message spam. (IMG: J.Anderson)
The Associated Press has a report that the messages, commercial in nature, were sent to more than two-hundred million phones in China from the top two carriers, China Mobile and China Unicom. The fallout over the spam caused one company Focus Media to issue a public apology for the unsolicited adverts. “…the incident violated our company's rules and we are now working hard to fix the problem,” a Focus spokesperson said to the AP.
Mobile spam is something that is not entirely new to the realm of mobile phones. However, while the numbers for mobile spam grow in the US, Asia is by far the victim with an average of eight junk text messages per week, per person. This seems like a small number until you take in account that Chain has more than 555 million mobile users.
Xinhua News Agency is reporting that Zhong Zhihong, an official at the Ministry of Information Industry in charge of information security, is urging China Mobile and China Unicom to do more to block the Spam. He pointed out that it is relatively simple to do on their infrastructure.
There is no need to rush and call text message spam a crisis, unless you are charged for each text you receive. However, security companies like Symantec or Trend Micro, recognize the potential for mobile devices to pose a security risk. Offering Malware and Spam filtering on mobile phones, and manage appliances for mail filtering at the gateway.
Xinhua News Agency said that both government officials and business executives are working on ways to shape regulations on spam ID and blocking. There was no report as to when the investigation, or probe as it is being coined, would be completed.
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