Text messaging is by far the most responsive way to communicate remotely: People frequently ignore phone calls and emails, but 98% of text messages are read and 45% get a response, according to Gartner.
The trouble is, text messaging – or SMS, for short message service – can leave companies wide open to social engineering attacks, referred to as "smishing." The threat has become exacerbated amid a largely remote workforce that has turned to platforms including Slack, Skype, WhatsApp, and iMessage to reach each other quickly.
"SMS is the absolute worst protocol to use for communications," says April Wright, a security consultant at ArchitectSecurity.org. "It is widely supported, which is why it is still in use, but it provides zero encryption or authenticity validation of the sender or receiver."
The heightened popularity of text-based communications is the very thing that makes it susceptible to smishing, where texts that seemingly come from trusted sources include, for example, downloadable malware or links to phony websites. Such was the case in a September campaign in which scammers posed as the United States Parcel Service, as well as a February campaign in which messages seemingly came from Federal Express.
Vishing is similar to smishing except criminals use voice technologies – the telephone – to, for example, dupe people into providing bits of personal data. And both are related to phishing, which includes email and impacts more than 90% of organizations, according to securi ..
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