Cellphone spam clogs up phone lines at Houston Zoo

# Someone told me it’s all happening at the zoo.. #

File this one under “bizarre”.  Officials at Houston Zoo have called in the FBI, after a bizarre spam of SMS text messages caused their phone switchboard to be swamped.

According to a report in the Houston Chronicle, the zoo’s main switchboard has been bombarded with calls since late April.  Receiving ten times the normal number of calls is no fun, particularly when the phone callers are not asking about zoo opening hours, or wondering how to adopt a penguin, but instead following up an unsolicited text message they have received.

The…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.