Submitted by Patrick Smith on Tue, 13 Jul 2010 09:50

While there was an increase in SMS spam around the 2010 FIFA World Cup, Arjan Lasschuit, Director of Product Marketing at Tekelec tells us that it doesn’t just take a large-scale event to attract significant fraudulent activity.

SMS spam has become a major problem in developing markets, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region. Recently, police in Malaysia broke a spam ring that was able to make about $2 million by tempting innocent people to pay advanced fees for fictitious lottery winnings. But with the emergence of mobile banking applications and the transfer of payments over mobile networks, SMS spam is now migrating towards the developed markets.

The simplicity and reach of SMS, which helped its popularity grow rapidly among users, are also what make it an appealing fraud tool for spammers. Mobile spam also succeeds because the majority of phone users still inherently trust the text messages they receive. The relatively new and more isolated nature of mobile spam, compared to widespread and well-know e-mail spam, makes subscribers more vulnerable.

Public awareness of SMS threats is better in some regions than others. For example, in China and many parts of the Middle East, SMS spam is a daily occurrence. But consumers in Western Europe and in North America perceive SMS spam as nothing more than an irritation or misplaced marketing campaign reaching their handsets.

Unfortunately, that is not the case. As sales of mobile phones continue to outperform sales of PCs and laptops, SMS spam will continue to migrate towards the developed markets. Also, we expect to see fraudsters exploiting the increased use of mobile banking applications. Spammers have shown that their attacks tend to follow the money. While signalling system 7 (SS7)-based attacks tend to be operators’ main headache at the moment, as smartphone adoption continues to rise, fraudsters will attempt new SMS-based attack vectors and exploitation of operating system (OS)-based capabilities. This means that operators will need to use new methods secure their networks.

Many operators have SMS spam reporting systems in place, but these only account for activity that takes place within national boundaries. According to a study conducted by the GSMA, 68% of global mobile network operators reported receipt of mobile spam that originated from senders outside their own networks. A suite of enforcement points, such as Policy and Charging Rules Function (PCRF), an SMS Firewall, and monitoring and analytics solutions, are essential to securing the network in the future. These tools can provide content-level screening and pattern analysis, which can help detect SMS attacks through methods such as keyword filtering and pattern detection.

In the end, operators need to be proactive in preventing spam attacks by deploying solutions that monitor, detect and block SMS threats. Having a coordinated and highly responsive approach is crucial in helping protect networks.