Smishing, cyber attacks

Unfortunatelly often happens that on our smartphone can arrive text messages, the old SMS, fraudolent. It’s called smishing and it’s a phenomenon mentioned often in the web. SMS text messages that arrive to cheat on us. Let’s see together what they are and how to defence ourselves.

What does smishing mean

The word is made with SMS and phishing. They are messages that often say to come from our bank or from the poste and they ask about personal informations or about our bank accounts.

If you decide to follow the instructions of the message you might be defraud, the cyber criminals are stealing the datas of your credit cards, or even worst, your identity.

Until now we saw something similar with the e-mail. The criminals sent spam messages that had a link inside it full of malware.

Now they even use the SMS, to attack different people, but that have the same effect.

The bait of the smishing

We were talking about a target of people. The ones that open obsolete mails have an age between the 40 and the 60, the victims of the smishing have an average age between the 65 and the 80.

Infact, a study demonstrated that to use the SMS are a large slice of population that isn’t used to use the smartphone.

They don’t know very well how the links work, and especially they don’t know nothing about the internet rules, so they believe to what they read and they often believe the texts of the messages.

Most of the people, especially the youngest ones, know very well the risks of the web, but some kinds of users still believe about what appears on the smartphone.

They don’t use the operating system at the 100% of their potentialities and they think that their mobile phone is safer than the computer, so they believe in the SMS.

The most affected devices

Between the devices most affected by this phenomena there are the Android 0nes. That’s because they are the most sold and used right by the people with that age.

The cyber crime is evolving every day and the smishing doesn’t have limits of system. Infact, even on iOS it’s possible to become a victim of this fraud.

Therefore, we have to say that very often we use the smartphone without to think about what we are doing. We are careless, on a rush and very often this means to fastly answer to a message.

What do the cyber criminals want?

Mainly who does the smishing wants to obtain the personal datas of the user or to steal from their credit cards.

Someone, are even able to turn upside down whole bank systems by attacking the companies through their employees, which don’t know what the digital thief is doing.

To make it they use two methods. They create hidden messages signed by users that the victims know. An example is the one of a message from your bank that asks you to access through a link to change the datas of your expiring credit card.

Another method is the one of the obsolete links. Right like the spam mails, inside the message there is link with an offert or an image dedicate to a hobby of the user to which we will click.

Protect ourselves from the cyber attacks

Protect ourselves from these attacks is easy. First of all the most important thing is to not believe to the text messages.

Doing nothing is surely the first and the biggest solution against these frauds.

An alarm ring that the message is a fraud are the urgent messages for an offert, or even the messages that come from the bank or from the post office that ask you to change your access datas. No one will ever contact you through SMS for something like that.

If you don’t know sender, just throw it away. This is a rule to protect ourselves. Especially be careful to the messages that come from foreign or that have a strange prefix.

Lastely, never leave inside your smartphone your personal informations and report some frauds to defend even the others from the smishing attacks.

This post is also available in: Italiano