April 1st, 2009
Report: SMS Spam is on the rise
How secure is your text message inbox? One of the topics coming out of CTIA this week is the inevitable rise of SMS spam.
Cloudmark - a company that, of course, is in the business of SMS security for carriers - is touting its analysis of mobile spam at the CTIA show in Las Vegas. In a news release, the company writes:
Today, users of text and multimedia messaging are receiving rising numbers of unsolicited messages on their mobile devices. Initially, this may seem nothing more than an annoyance, but this practice is often the prelude to fraudulent activity as spammers become more adept at infiltrating the network. In many ways, the North American mobile messaging market is experiencing an evolution similar to what the Asian market experienced earlier this decade. Today, Asian mobile operators and consumers are feeling the impact - according to a number of published reports, mobile phone users in China received more than 300 billion spam in 2008 alone.
Though I personally haven’t felt the crush of spam in my SMS inbox, I can see where this becomes a potential problem. With unlimited messaging plans becoming the norm, the costs of sending and receiving messages has plummeted.
For these sort of issues, I turn to my kids - one teenager and one pre-teen - who spend very little time chatting away voice minutes. Instead, they use their phones constantly to communicate using SMS short hand. In addition, their pictures, video clips and even fun animated images are all shared over their phones.
In the past, there have been a number of discussions about e-mail safety - parents talking to their kids, employers talking to their employees. It sounds like it could be time for parents and bosses to have another conversation - this time about smart usage of SMS. To drive home that point, I leave you with a one example provided by Cloudmark:
Spammers are now leveraging content from existing email and social networking scams to successfully launch similar attacks via new channels, including mobile. One example is the “Crush Spam” attack. This prolific email message sent to mobile users prompted them to share personal information in order to find out who has a crush on them. The fine print of the message opts subscribers in for up to $60 per month in charges. The scam was repeated for months and resulted in millions of dollars in care costs and refunds for U.S. operators. Cloudmark observed the Crush Spam attack in email, SMS and social networks.
Sam Diaz is a senior editor at ZDNet. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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