Short Message Service (SMS) Phishing Attacks and Defenses: A Systematic Review
For cybersecurity researchers and practitioners, this paper provides a structured overview of the current smishing landscape and identifies gaps, but it is a literature review without novel experiments.
This systematic review systematizes smishing research across user perception, attack characterization, defenses, and datasets, revealing a rapidly evolving threat that caused $470M in US losses in 2024, and proposes future research directions.
SMS Phishing (also known as 'smishing') is a growing deceptive social engineering (SE) attack that leverages mobile SMS to conduct cybercrimes such as stealing sensitive information or spreading malware by tricking users into interacting with attackers' messages (e.g., responding to or clicking URLs). This threat has increased rapidly in recent years, causing $470M in financial losses for United States users in 2024 alone. This threat is also evolving rapidly, meaning that attackers continually adapt their tactics, reshaping the landscape. There is a significant body of literature on investigating smishing attacks and defenses. However, there is no systematic review that reflects the current attack and defense landscape along with available resources (i.e., relevant datasets). This motivates us to systematize the current smishing research efforts, including the following four research pillars: (a) user perception and susceptibility, (b) attack characterization, (c) defense landscape, and (d) smishing datasets. This leads us to propose novel future research directions towards effectively mitigating smishing attacks.