Cyber

You see the sender name at the top: “Your Bank”, “Postal Service”, “Health Fund”, “BIT”, “Tax Authority” – and your brain immediately relaxes: it’s in the same conversation thread, same name, same style – so it must be real… right? That’s exactly where the scam begins. The illusion of a “trusted sender” Israeli security researcher Ran Bar-Zik explains that one of the biggest illusions of safety is our trust in the sender name. The sender name in an SMS is very easy to fake –

In 2024–2025, Israel saw a wave of attempts to hijack Telegram accounts, some of which relied on an unexpected angle: the old-fashioned voicemail service provided by mobile carriers. The attack pattern, informally dubbed “Telegram – Voicemail”, shows how a weak link in legacy telephony infrastructure can become the entry point into a modern messaging platform. This article summarizes, in an informational and non-technical way, how the pattern works, how it was documented in t