Short Message Service (SMS) Phishing Attacks and Defenses: A Systematic Review
Mir Mehedi A. Pritom, Seyed Mohammad Sanjari, Maraz Mia, Ashfak Md Shibli, S M Mostaq Hossain + 2 more
TLDR
This paper systematically reviews SMS phishing (smishing) attacks, defenses, user susceptibility, and available datasets to propose future mitigation strategies.
Key contributions
- Systematizes current smishing research across four key pillars.
- Examines user perception, attack characteristics, and defense strategies.
- Identifies and reviews available smishing datasets.
- Proposes novel future research directions for effective mitigation.
Why it matters
Smishing is a rapidly evolving cyber threat causing significant financial losses. This systematic review fills a gap by consolidating current research on attacks, defenses, and datasets, providing a crucial foundation for future mitigation efforts.
Original Abstract
SMS Phishing (also known as 'smishing') is a growing deceptive social engineering (SE) attack that leverages mobile SMS to conduct cybercrimes such as stealing sensitive information or spreading malware by tricking users into interacting with attackers' messages (e.g., responding to or clicking URLs). This threat has increased rapidly in recent years, causing $470M in financial losses for United States users in 2024 alone. This threat is also evolving rapidly, meaning that attackers continually adapt their tactics, reshaping the landscape. There is a significant body of literature on investigating smishing attacks and defenses. However, there is no systematic review that reflects the current attack and defense landscape along with available resources (i.e., relevant datasets). This motivates us to systematize the current smishing research efforts, including the following four research pillars: (a) user perception and susceptibility, (b) attack characterization, (c) defense landscape, and (d) smishing datasets. This leads us to propose novel future research directions towards effectively mitigating smishing attacks.
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