SmishViz: Towards A Graph-based Visualization System for Monitoring and Characterizing Ongoing Smishing Threats
Seyed Mohammad Sanjari, Ashfak Md Shibli, Maraz Mia, Maanak Gupta, Mir Mehedi Ahsan Pritom · 2024
SMS phishing (aka 'smishing') threats have grown to be a serious concern for mobile users around the globe. In cases of successful smishing, attackers take advantage of users' trust through deceptive text messages to trick them into downloading malicious content, disclosing private information, or becoming victims of fraud. Current studies on smishing mostly focus on the classification of smishing (or spam) messages from benign ones as a means of defense. However, there is no systematic study to characterizing smishing threats and their landscapes by which we can monitor the ongoing campaigns from a bird's-eye perspective to apply effective defense. In this paper, we propose SmishViz, a graph-based visualization system that can aid defenders (i.e., analysts) to characterize ongoing smishing threats in the wild and allow them to monitor the connected campaigns and campaign-operations through effective graph visualization approach integrated with state-of-the-art open-source visualization tool. This paper also provides case study with real-world smishing dataset to showcase the efficacy of SmishViz system in practical use-case scenarios. Our case study results reveal that the proposed system can certainly help defenders to track and monitor ongoing smishing campaigns, understand attackers' tactics to formulate strategic defense and uproot the attack operations.