What is Smishing? Smishing is a form of phishing, which you are probably familiar with. It’s an attempt to fool you into giving out your sensitive information through text messages or voice calls that show up on your cell phone. The term “smishing” comes from SMS (text messaging) and the word “phish.”
It’s important to note that smishing can happen in two ways: 1) someone will send you a text message pretending to be someone else, like one of your contacts; or 2) they’ll make a call where they try to get you to answer by saying something like “hey, I just got this new app – do you want it too?” Also, recommended check this article.
What You Have To Know To Define Smishing
Smishing is a form of social engineering, which uses phishing to gain access to your personal information. Smishing works by sending you an SMS message that appears as if it’s from someone trustworthy like the bank or email provider asking you to enter some confidential data into their website. If they manage to get hold of this information they can access your accounts and drain them.
Smishing includes a number of features that define it as an individual crime.
– It uses SMS messaging services to contact victims and gain their trust in order to obtain information such as passwords, credit card numbers, or any other piece of data the criminals might find useful for their own benefits.
Tips To Help You Avoid Smishing Attack
Avoiding smishing attack is very easy.
– Don’t click on any links sent to you via SMS, don’t reply, and simply delete the message.
Another thing that might be useful is to have a look at your phone bill every now and then for weird charges if someone managed to get hold of your account details by using this method.
– Don’t give your phone number to strangers. If you are asked, don’t provide it if the context is not completely clear. For example, someone may ask for it so they can call you back or forward an email request to be sent through text messaging instead of over email. On the other hand, someone who legitimately wants to communicate with you will usually be willing to give their number in return.
– When possible, to avoid smishing attack, use two-factor authentication when signing into websites or connecting with social media accounts. This ensures that even if your password is compromised, the account cannot be accessed without the second code sent through another channel (such as email).
– Keep an eye out for suspicious URLs. Sometimes smishing messages are not able to harvest phone numbers and therefore just contain a URL instead of a text message link. If you receive anything from this type of SMS campaign, don’t click on it! Use Google’s safe browsing service to check whether or not links have been flagged as unsafe.
– If you don’t expect a certain SMS, and it asks for information such as your social security number, bank account number, or credit card details, do not respond to the text as it can be smishing! This is likely an attempt at identity theft. Report any messages like these to your mobile carrier immediately.
– If you receive a strange text message from someone that claims to be your bank, credit card company, or retailer, do not respond. However, if this is an emergency and there’s something wrong with your account or some suspicious activity on it, call the number given in the messages instead of replying. Do not give them any personal information over SMS!
How to Understand That You Have Received Smishing Text Messages?
There are several ways to understand that you have received smishing text messages. If you have received a text message from any of your contacts, but when you open the link in that message it is different than what you were expecting. If there are no photos attached to the smishing messages and if they contain some wrong grammar or spelling mistakes.
Make sure it doesn’t have any suspicious URLs in its content. In this case, you should ignore these messages because they are just trying to trick you into clicking those links so that hackers could get access to your accounts! Some other ideas mentioned include being careful with opening emails from unknown sources and always checking URL addresses carefully when clicking on social media posts as they can also be smishing text messages. This way we will ensure our safety online and we will be able to avoid getting our accounts hacked!
Last but not least, we should always remember that we need to practice good habits and take the best security measures in order for us to protect ourselves from potential smishing attacks. So make sure you don’t send any personal information via email or text message and use secure passwords every time when log into your online accounts. This way you can keep all your valuable data safe from smishing at all times!