Spam messages will continue to dog naive Pinoys, says expert

Filipinos will continue to deal with spam messages as cybercriminals become more ingenious in their ways of deceiving unsuspecting victims, according to an official of cybersecurity firm Kaspersky.

Noushin Shabab, senior security researcher at Kaspersky’s global research and analysis team, said cyberattackers knew how to exploit human behavior when they send the “robotexts.”

“They (cybercriminals) take advantage of different human behaviors like how people get excited about something that sounds unexpected or sounds too good,” she told the Inquirer in an interview in Thailand last week.

The Kaspersky official said the attacks were only expected to become more “sophisticated” moving forward.

“For the past few years, we have seen cybercriminals that are not usually smart, but more opportunistic. They are now following the footsteps of sophisticated threat actors,” she said. The latter is usually a person or organization with an intent to threaten or destroy cybersecurity defenses. They may or may not be hackers themselves, or they can employ hackers to carry out their plans.

Early this year, cellphones were bombarded with spam messages with a link to sites offering fake job opportunities promising big salaries.

In May, the National Telecommunications Commission warned the public against falling for the text scams, which is a form of phishing attack.

In phishing, scammers trick users into surrendering their personal and sensitive information by sending suspicious emails, mobile messages and links. Having access to such data will allow scammers to take over or use without permission the victims’ bank account.

“People know about this but I don’t think people have enough knowledge. They are not aware that they can be easily targeted,” Shabab said.

For example, some individuals are still easily deceived when they receive a dubious message from banks or government agencies.

Shabab said having a mobile phone number registry could help address the problem.

In the Philippines, there is a similar measure called the SIM (subscriber identity module) card registration bill. This was vetoed by the previous administration, raising the need for further study of the measure.

Local telecommunications players, for their part, promised to do their part in filtering and blocking spam messages. INQ