6mo ago

Two men arrested for creating illegal telephone mast in the UK

www.datacenterdynamics.com 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

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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.
  
  Yeah, I had to do a security cert last year and it had a bunch of made up sounding crap like that.
  
  It feels like one of those where the people that have expertise enough to name new things are not experts in naming things.
  
  I encountered Quishing the other day - the inadvertent scanning of QR codes that take a browser to a malformed URL or site with malware embedded.
  Back in my day, it was just called "being a bit dense", especially as most cameras/QR readers will offer you a prompt to go to a website first.
  
  Developers are notoriously bad at naming anything. Cybersecurity experts are generally developers.
- "Smishing" sounds like kiwi slang for playing Smash Bros
  
  We were smishing in the shid!
  
  At the beginning of Smash Bros Ultimate, some people jokingly tried to make "Smush" a thing (since the previous, fourth game, officially Super Smash Bros for 3DS/for Wii U, was often referred to as Sm4sh for short).
- 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.
  
  Well, I'm not a cybersec specialist, but my job requires us to comply with NIST cyber security frameworks, including going through external audits every year. In my opinion, your basic generalities are fine for those not working in that field specifically.
  However, for cyber security analysts and other specialists, I think specific subcategories are necessary. The reason being, IT is an absolutely massive field that contains a ton of specialties. As such, that means there are roughly an equal variety of malicious actors in the same field.
  There's no such thing really as a general "hacker" anymore. Especially when you take into consideration the rapid expansion of state sponsored cyber attacks/warfare. You'll have specialists for various types of:
  phishing (e.g. targeting general pop/employees, or those going for specific people)
  cryptography (e.g. those who try to compromise an org's PKI, or people finding vulns to exploit expired certs like what happened with Azure last year)
  vuln hunters/exploiters (e.g. people that monitor known vulnerabilities and probe orgs' defenses to see if those vulns are present/unpatched/unmitigated, or even people who try to discover new ones)
  malware engineers (e.g. fairly self explanatory, but malware is a very broad term and can come in numerous shapes and sizes, like even using infected images on a website to conduct RCE on mobile devices like what happened a year or two ago)
  Sorry, tangent is getting a bit long-winded now. Anyway, tldr; general terms are fine for laymen or non-specialists, but more precise terms are beneficial for experts in that field.
  
  Sure, specialists can and should use specialized terms. But that's not what articles like this are targeting. Keep that to symposiums and whatnot, and keep the general public vernacular simple to avoid confusion. That's all I'm saying.
  
  Fair point. Though, the source is data center dynamics, which does seem a bit niche.
  
  I suppose, but the article has nothing to do with data centers and is written like any other news article on regular news sites. It's a little more tech focused, but still very accessible.
  
  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.
- So is original phishing supposed to be over the phone? Like it's the email game called emishing or something?
  
  When they send the emails at night, it's called nocturnal emishing. It's a serious problem that affects thousands of people each night.
  
  They were arrested for baiting people with their mast.
  
  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.

31 comments