Over the past few weeks I have noticed that there is a mystery contact showing up in my text message history:
When I click into this message there is nothing in the history. I went to the domain associated with the text message and found the Chinese news site: hxxp://21cn.com/. I've noticed that the day associated with the text ("Monday" in the image above) will update once a week or so.
Has anyone heard of anything like this? Has my phone been compromised?
More than likely, the domain 21cn.com has been compromised and is being used to send spam. Bear in mind that spam does not always have to have a message body and can many times be sent from an unsuspecting victim accounts that were not secured properly or suffered a breach of any kind.
In regards to the date changing, that may be because of a new message being sent. Apple has odd quirks when sending 'iMessages'. For instance, I can open up iMessenger on my macbook and send a 'blank' text from my account to anyone (by simply pressing return).
Alternatively, this could be the result of some sophisticated virus (or perhaps a simple bug with IOS). I find the virus assumption unlikely, but it is still theoretically possible.
I would just delete it and perhaps block that contact (pubdma@21cn.com) and perhaps report the spam