Russian Human Rights Commissioner Tatiana Moskalkova issued a warning via Telegram regarding fraudulent messages being sent to the families of Russian military personnel. These messages contain malicious files and falsely claim to be from the Red Cross organization.
According to the warning, families of service members are receiving harmful files, specifically with the .apk file extension, sent under the guise of the Red Cross committee. The scammers are attempting to deceive relatives into installing an application that they claim will help locate soldiers participating in the Special Military Operation who are prisoners of war. The official message highlighted that seeing “.apk” at the end of a file name is a clear indication of a potentially viral file.
Relatives were strongly cautioned that installing such files could lead to the loss of control over their social media accounts and grant the malicious actors access to their banking applications and other sensitive information.
The public is urged to exercise extreme caution, avoid opening files received from unknown senders, and always pay close attention to the file extensions of any content they are prompted to download.
This alert comes after previous reports detailing other methods used by fraudsters, including duplicating websites of online stores and payment processing pages to steal financial information.
Clement Ashworth 
Barnaby Whitfield