Hello and welcome to the Wednesday, October 18, 2023 edition of the Sands and its Storm Center's Stormcast.

My name is Johannes Ulrich and the time I'm recording from Jacksonville, Florida.

Quick diary today about fishing and spam via SMS, sometimes called smishing,

and how the landscape may be changing a little bit here.

The entire problem with automated, unsolicited SMS messages has become a pretty big deal,

and with that, lots of complaints to the FCC and to carriers.

So now there are some new regulations that I think I may have talked already about in the past,

but good reminder as some of this is starting to get into effect now,

that try to restrict some of the malicious use of SMS.

What this results in is that carriers will do more blocking and filtering

of SMS messages, in particular if they are originating from numbers that are not supposed to send

SMS messages. Earlier this year, the FCC released a directive stating that carriers must now

keep databases of phone numbers that will never send an SMS message, like, for example,

the old-fashioned landline, some government numbers are mentioned here, for example, and they must block any SMS messages that appear to come from these numbers.

And also, some carries in particular, T-Mobile has been kind of vocal about this, are starting to basically use sort of their own algorithms to block some SMS messages that they consider spam.

Now, one sort of characteristic that's being used here to identify spam is that some numbers will only send SMS messages and never receive them.

I think this may be behind a recent trend where you do get these SMS phishing emails

and then they ask you to reply first.

Now, also got a comment to the diary where one reader states that replying to an SMS message may actually activate links in the SMS message

on some systems and then also sort of make it less likely that future messages are sort of

automatically being filtered by the device. So this may affect filtering by the carrier as well as by the device.

The bad side of all of this is that this will certainly affect if you are sending,

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