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SMiShing & Vishing: What Are They?

SMiShing & Vishing: What Are They?

  • 21st June, 2021
  • IGS Cleaner

Cybercriminals today, can do a lot of stuff with your personal data. They can sell it on the deep web for profit, use it for their personal gain to get money or make possessions, they are utilizing this personal information to gain passage to costly medical procedures and file medicinal claims and insurances. If you are not careful in protecting your personal data, documents, and records, you will be wasting more time in fixing the mess done by damaged credit knowledge than actually blocking them.


The Identity theft criminals have now gone back to basics. They are liking the old-school conventional and low-technology methods and tools to steal identity, information from other people. However, the use of high technology still takes its place in these methods. The process uses phones and automatically dials from a long list of targeted phone numbers asking them for their personal information. This type of fraud system also enables the sender or caller to mask the number that displays up on the caller This is what we call smishing or vishing.


The devious threats to your online identity, here we have described them in detail.


What Is SMiShing?


SMiShing or SMS phishing is a shrewd process to obtain information. It works through messages via SMS, social messenger apps, MMS, or instant messengers like WhatsApp. In contrast to this, vishing or voice phishing plans get pitched through voice calls like over a telephone connection.


Now, SMiShing has progressed exponentially over the past few years followed by the increased popularity of Internet-connected devices, phones across the world. Aside from this, Vishing has been a resident for decades, but with the exposure of time and technology, it has molded itself into a deadly tool to hack into people’s systems and lives.


Interestingly though, both of these methods regulate themselves on human emotion and hence require diverse manipulation methods to compel its victims to take action.


What Is Vishing?


As mentioned above, Vishing or voice phishing is a powerful and active social engineering hacking technique. Vishing projects often plan schemes to obtain the necessary vital information to infiltrate into an organization’s network. Just like SMiShing, Vishing activities, are similar in their process and need to gain information and knowledge without consent. They too are expanding very fast across social media platforms.


To explain here is an example, a few days ago, a voice call was circulating in the messenger app named WhatsApp. The caller here portrayed to be an official staff representative from the popular Amitabh Bacchan hosted game show known as KBC (Kaun Banega Crorepati), and congratulating several random WhatsApp users with getting a lottery of INR 20 Lakh. So In order to transfer the winning prize money, the staff of the show aka. the fraudster asked for bank account numbers and a photograph mentioning details of your bank debit card.


Here is another example, In the year 2019, a professional cybercriminal mimicked a big companies CEO’s voice utilizing artificial intelligence software and proposed its employees to transfer a charity fund worth roughly $ 1,000 to a fraud account. The artificial intelligence method used herein the criminal attack is called Deepfake, which can imitate anybody’s voice by just using a one-minute speech file of the victim.


Ways to protect yourself from smishing and vishing then follow these steps:


  • If you find yourself across any finance or -related frauds, report the incident to Anti-fraud cell India on 8585063104.
  • Never receive any messages or calls from unknown persons.
  • Carefully read every incoming message twice from any banking, or large enterprises, or game show awards before acting on it.
  • Lookup for the URL(s), phone numbers, email ID, you accept using a thorough online search before clicking on it.
  • Never call back on the deceitful-looking message of the sender. Blocking can help too, it could stop the person from sending similar kinds of messages or calls from the related number.
  • Large companies occasionally obtain data from their customers via phone calls or emails so check before you respond to them.
  • Check the authenticity of the caller or sender before giving away your valuable personal and financial information.
  • Include a cybersecurity awareness program and high-tech software for all your employee systems.