Exposing Cross-Channel Abuse in Converged Communications Infrastructure with Text-Messaging Scams

Abstract

Recent convergence of the Internet with the telecommunications infrastructure offers malicious actors the ability to craft cross-channel attacks that leverage both telephony and Internet resources. In this talk, we first the introduce the notion of cross-channel abuse and explain why it’s an emerging tactic used by fraudsters. We then present a longitudinal study of the support infrastructure aiding cross-channel text-messaging abuse which reveals interesting insights on domain and IP infrastructure used in text messaging scams, spam and phishing attacks. We conclude with a brief overview of other cross-channel abuse cases such as technical support scams.