Phishing droplr12/27/2023 All-in-all, as our online world is increasingly becoming one conducted by cell phone, smishing is growing in popularity with attackers. Users cannot “hover” over an SMS URL to find out where it ultimately goes to, and SMS applications don’t contain nearly as many anti-malicious controls as the typical browser does (although many times, SMS URLs are opened up in the user’s browser anyway). Security people aren’t big fans of URL shortening services in general, but when paired with limited pre-inspection capabilities of SMS and lack of authentication, there are even more reasons to be skeptical. Most smishing includes shortened URLs which are intended to hide the eventual destination. So, a URL link might say something like and when open, might redirect to something that looks like. SMS URL links are often “shortened” to some innocuous-looking link that is hard to figure out where it ultimately links to. A receiver might not believe the sender is the President of the United States (unless they already have a formal relationship with the President), but otherwise most people are susceptible to simply accepting that the SMS sender is who they claim to be.Īdditionally, URL (Uniform Resource Locator) links sent via SMS are often harder to inspect for security issues without completely loading the web page the link points to. I, and anyone else, can be anyone via SMS. And as long as that person hasn’t previously noted the number as a particular sender’s ID and stored it in their contact list, it will show up looking like any other SMS message without an authenticated name attached. SMS is unauthenticated, meaning anyone can send another person an SMS message by simply knowing the recipient’s phone number. There are many rogue applications which allow senders to send SMS messages from spoofed or borrowed/shared telephone numbers. Anyone receiving an SMS can only, at best, be assured at the phone number the SMS message comes from is accurate, and even that isn’t guaranteed. The biggest problem from a security perspective is that an SMS sender is not authenticated beyond attached phone numbers. Today, depending on the mobile network vendor and involved applications, SMS-based apps can send longer messages and more than simple text-based characters (such as emoticons, pictures, videos, etc.). The original message size limitation was due SMS’ reliance on an underlying phone protocol known as Signaling System No. Already in widespread use by the 1990s, it is rare that a cell phone doesn’t support SMS, which originally only allowed a maximum of 140- to 160-characters to be sent in a single message to one or more other recipients using their cell phone numbers. Short Messaging Service (SMS) is a popular text-based messaging service standard, which nearly all cell phones support. KnowBe4 has been covering and warning users about it and its coming rise for years.This blog post will cover why smishing is becoming so popular, show some general and more sophisticated examples, and discuss defenses. Long neglected by phishers and spammers, smishing has recently become a very common way of spamming, phishing, and spear phishing potential victims. Smishing is phishing via Short Message Service (SMS) on a participating device, usually a cell phone.
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