Cybercriminals are always on the hunt for your personal information. Once they get your information, they can steal your identity, spend your money and harm your credit. While techniques such as dumpster diving are still used to gather sensitive information, cybercriminals are adopting more advanced tactics. Phishing, the practice of sending fraudulent email pretending to be a reputable company to trick individuals into revealing personal information, is becoming more prevalent.
One type of phishing attack now being used is smishing, or SMS phishing. A smishing attack takes the tactics of an email phishing attack and translates them to a text. By using social engineering, cybercriminals can convince individuals to reveal sensitive information with smishing attacks.
There are several indicators that a text you receive might be a smishing attack, and there are proper ways to prevent and respond to these attacks. With the right knowledge, you can protect yourself from smishing and other social engineering attacks.
Bart is Senior Product Marketing Manager of Threat Intelligence at CrowdStrike and holds +20 years of experience in threat monitoring, detection and intelligence. After starting his career as a network security operations analyst at a Belgian financial organization, Bart moved to the US East Coast to join multiple cybersecurity companies including 3Com/Tippingpoint, RSA Security, Symantec, McAfee, Venafi and FireEye-Mandiant, holding both product management, as well as product marketing roles.
