Quantum Defence

Vishing (voice or VoIP phishing) is an electronic fraud tactic in which individuals are tricked into revealing critical financial or personal information to unauthorized entities. Vishing works like phishing but does not always occur over the Internet and is carried out using voice technology. A vishing attack can be conducted by voice email, VoIP (voice over IP), or landline or cellular telephone.

The potential victim receives a message, often generated by speech synthesis, indicating that suspicious activity has taken place in a credit card account, bank account, mortgage account or other financial service in their name. The victim is told to call a specific telephone number and provide information to "verify identity" or to "ensure that fraud does not occur." If the attack is carried out by telephone, caller ID spoofing can cause the victim's set to indicate a legitimate source, such as a bank or a government agency.

SMS and text messages have become a popular tool for phishing. Scammers use social engineering to scam people into providing information by creating a sense of urgency and a false pretext of legitimacy to trick people into providing personal information.

Do not provide personal information, especially passwords, or PIN through a text.

Do not open links through text messages and SMS.

Spear-phishing emails have improved within the past few years and are now extremely difficult to detect without prior knowledge on spear-phishing protection. Spear-phishing attackers target victims who put personal information on the internet.

Cybercrooks may be able to force mobiles to send premium-rate SMS messages or prevent them from receiving messages due to security weaknesses in mobile telecoms standards.

The weakness involves the handling of messages directed towards SIM Application Toolkits, applications preloaded onto SIM cards by mobile operators. The applications can be used for functions such as displaying available credit or checking voicemail, as well as handling value-added services, such as micro-payments.