Kevin WatkinsSecurity Researcher
Shaun AimotoTechnical Product Owner
SMS-based outreach has become a standard in the political playbook, with candidates and their supporters soliciting financial support, opinions, and votes through texting with increasing frequency and sophistication. In the course of protecting enterprise endpoints, Symantec, a division of Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO), has turned up evidence of an increasingly prevalent scam tactic in the run-up to the U.S. presidential election: SMS phishing attempts using bait with campaign, voting, and political themes.
Symantec Endpoint Protection Mobile (SEP Mobile) shields users from SMS phishing attempts by checking URLs found in text messages against the threat intelligence in Symantec WebPulse, part of the Symantec Global Intelligence Network (GIN), and alerting users when the links are suspect.
We took a look at the links contained in SMS messages sent to mobile devices located in the United States between the first week in August and late October 2020 and found a sharp increase during that period in the percentage of election-themed messages containing phishing URLs.
Figure 1. Messages relating to the presidential election 2020 – August 3 to October 19
Over the last three months, we observed the number of election-associated text messages containing links to websites double. Of these messages, we saw the number bringing the user to a scam/phishing/or attack-associated website increase from 1 in 5 (18.3%) to almost half (48.6%).
These attacks have been observed in all regions of the United States, and target the full range of the political spectrum.
Figure 2. Example election-related SMS phishing messages
Mitigation
SMS phishing presents a risk to all smartphone users. In addition to relying on protection like Symantec Endpoint Prote ..
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