Two men arrested for creating illegal telephone mast in the UK
Two men arrested for creating illegal telephone mast in the UK
The mast was used to send thousands of smishing text messages to the public
Smishing is a phishing cybersecurity attack carried out over mobile text messaging. It's also known as SMS phishing.
I had never heard that term before. Is it just a UKism, or am I one of today's lucky 10,000?
Not just UK. It’s a stupid term that organizations use in cybersecurity trainings but no one else uses.
Yup, those are both the industry terms
I've worked in IT for 15 years and it's the first time I've heard SMS phishing condensed to smishing. But I specialize in servers and server security, so I'm not too surprised it's a thing.
We're forced to take a cybersecurity online course every year, and I'm constantly confused at what the terms are supposed to mean. Like why is spear phishing a thing? Why do we need specialized terms for every conceivable variation of a concept?
Let's just stick with basic terms:
- malware - malicious software
- social engineering - covers calls, texts, emails, etc designed to get access to something they shouldn't
- cracking - breaking cryptography
- security hacking - breaking secure systems by exploiting bugs, such as zero-days or unpatched systems, usually to get privilege escalation
I may be missing a couple, but I think most cybersecurity concepts can fit in one of those categories.
Open Source Security Podcast with Josh Bresher and Kurt Sigfried. It's a pretty good source of news and discussion from a sysadmin perspective.
When I first read they were sending smishing texts I thought hey this is neat, some kind of kink that I can spend the day learning about, but then I read about the sms phising thing and was disappointed.
Always wonder if this is a state actor
Huayong Xu Is the name listed
So is original phishing supposed to be over the phone? Like it's the email game called emishing or something?
No, phone phishing is phphishing.
Nah phishing is a 90s term though probably coined in reference to phreaking. That started up in the 60s and by the 80s even the US had mostly switched to out of band signalling for their telephone system so none of the stuff worked any more.
He installed a fake antenna? like a fake cellular radio tower? how is it possible that phones just randomly trust this antenna? they explain very little in the article.
lovely, and my phone won't let me block 2G.
Short answer: security through obscurity
Eintelefonmast!
c/randomGerman
I've always wanted to broadcast encrypted signals from a ham radio out of the back of a van parked next to a nuclear power station.
