What Are Brands Telling You About Smishing? A Cross-Industry Evaluation of Customer Guidance

TL;DR

This study evaluates how 149 brands across various industries educate customers about smishing, revealing significant gaps and inconsistencies in guidance, and offers recommendations for standardizing and improving awareness efforts.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive content analysis of industry practices in smishing education, highlighting gaps and proposing standardization recommendations.

Findings

Only 46% of brands define smishing.

Less than 1% have video tutorials.

Half of the brands provide reporting instructions.

Abstract

Phishing attacks through text, also known as smishing, are a prevalent type of social engineering tactic in which attackers impersonate brands to deceive victims into providing personal information and/or money. While smishing awareness and cyber education are a key method by which organizations communicate this awareness, the guidance itself varies widely. In this paper, we investigate the state of practice of how 149 well-known brands across 25 categories educate their customers about smishing and what smishing prevention and reporting advice they provide. After conducting a comprehensive content analysis of the brands, we identified significant gaps in the smishing-related information provided: only 46\% of the 149 brands mentioned the definition of smishing, less than 1\% had a video tutorial on smishing, and only 50\% of brands provided instructions on how to report. Our study highlights variation in terminology, prevention advice, and reporting mechanisms across industries, with some brands recommending potentially ineffective strategies such as "ignoring suspicious messages." These findings establish a baseline for understanding the current state of industry smishing awareness advice and provide specific areas where standardization improvements are needed. From our evaluation, we provide recommendations for brands on how to offer streamlined education to their respective customers on smishing for better awareness and protection against increasing smishing attacks.