SMS Spam - A Holistic View

Lamine Aouad, Alejandro Mosquera, Slawomir Grzonkowski, Dylan Morss

2014

Abstract

Spam has been infesting our emails and Web experience for decades; distributing phishing scams, adult/dating scams, rogue security software, ransomware, money laundering and banking scams... the list goes on. Fortunately, in the last few years, user awareness has increased and email spam filters have become more effective, catching over 99% of spam. The downside is that spammers are constantly changing their techniques as well as looking for new target platforms and means of delivery, and as the world is going mobile so too are the spammers. Indeed, mobile messaging spam has become a real problem and is steadily increasing year-over-year. We have been analyzing SMS spam data from a large US carrier for over six months, and we have observed all these threats, and more, indiscriminately targeting large numbers of subscribers. In this paper, we touch on such questions as what is driving SMS spam, how do the spammers operate, what are their activity patterns and how have they evolved over time. We also discuss what types of challenges SMS spam has created in terms of filtering, as well as security.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Aouad L., Mosquera A., Grzonkowski S. and Morss D. (2014). SMS Spam - A Holistic View . In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT, (ICETE 2014) ISBN 978-989-758-045-1, pages 221-228. DOI: 10.5220/0005023202210228

in Bibtex Style

@conference{secrypt14,
author={Lamine Aouad and Alejandro Mosquera and Slawomir Grzonkowski and Dylan Morss},
title={SMS Spam - A Holistic View},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT, (ICETE 2014)},
year={2014},
pages={221-228},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0005023202210228},
isbn={978-989-758-045-1},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT, (ICETE 2014)
TI - SMS Spam - A Holistic View
SN - 978-989-758-045-1
AU - Aouad L.
AU - Mosquera A.
AU - Grzonkowski S.
AU - Morss D.
PY - 2014
SP - 221
EP - 228
DO - 10.5220/0005023202210228