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Smishing, also known as SMS phishing, is a form of phishing conducted via SMS messages that exploits the trust of its targeted users via text communications. Some smishing text examples result from a crafted social engineering attack, aiming to deceive the recipient of the text message and trick them into following the attacker’s instructions.
Attackers can impersonate legitimate business entities in their smishing text campaigns.
Attackers can impersonate legitimate business entities in their smishing campaigns; their campaign mainly has two goals: the first is they send deceptive messages to bait the recipients into revealing sensitive information, and the second is to have their target click on the provided malicious links within the body of the sms message.
The awareness of smishing tactics used by fraudsters and hackers through real-world examples is crucial for individuals and organisations to recognise and thwart such attacks to avoid potential losses.
For a couple of the more prominent Smishing text examples, here are some of the most notable which iZOOlogic has encountered. Within Australia, you might receive texts from entities describing themselves as “Centrelink” or the “ATO” requesting certain information in order to get some kind of monetary compensation.
Within the UK, the “TV License” smishing attack has been quite common. Some of the uniting factors are that they appear to be real, often governmental, entities that also commonly deal with money or transactions of different sizes.
Social engineering is the manipulation and deception of a person psychologically, influencing their action into performing steps that divulge important and private information for the purpose of frauding and accessing their assets and resources. The most common social engineering tactic employed on SMiShing campaigns by fraudsters is the sense of urgency that caught the uninformed and unaware victims off guard. This cyber threat is one of the most effective fraud campaigns today.
