Original Post: SMS Pumping: The Silent Threat Draining Your Business Funds | by Josh Thorne | Sep, 2024
The article discusses how cybercriminals exploit SMS services to inflate costs and harm businesses through a method called SMS pumping. This form of fraud involves artificially increasing SMS traffic, which exploits systems reliant on SMS for authentication or communication, thus escalating costs without providing any real value. The technique targets systems that use SMS for authentication and verification, involving fraudsters who send high volumes of SMS messages to phone numbers they control, often in complicity with unethical mobile network operators (MNOs). This results in businesses incurring unnecessary expenses while the criminals and MNOs profit. To combat this, the article suggests using fraud prevention tools that many SMS providers offer, such as country-level blocking, rate limiting, anomalous traffic alarms, CAPTCHAs, and exponential delays between verification retries. By employing these measures and monitoring SMS traffic closely, businesses can protect themselves from the significant financial and operational impacts of SMS pumping.
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