How to Protect Against Smashing Attacks on Your Phone

In the third version, you can receive direct notifications asking for personal or financial details — for example, with a prompt to reply to a message with your bank details, or with login details for a certain website. Like redirects to phishing sites, these details go straight to the people behind the theft plot, who will most likely use them to try to steal money or information.

Warning signs

While we can’t provide an easy-to-understand guide to spotting every batting attack you might encounter, there are some red flags to look out for. One is messages coming from numbers that don’t appear to be formatted correctly or contain unusual characters — these could be genuine messages from businesses or automated services, but they could also be attempts deceptive force, so proceed carefully.

It’s really rare for any individual or company to need to send you a message with a link embedded in it, so you might view such messages with suspicion. Even more rarely, these messages will appear anywhere — if they are authentic, they will usually show up when you are trying to verify your account or make an inquiry or are actively chatting with who’s that.

Another sign that delivers many compelling messages is their sense of urgency. Many of them will require you to act quickly and impose some kind of time limit on the response so that you are less likely to think about what you are doing. They may also try to entice you to follow a link by saying something shocking or controversial that needs immediate attention (like videos of you that have been leaked online).

They may offer a reward for the response (“win a gift card”), or the message may masquerade as a warning (“your account has been suspended”). The bottom line is that smashers want you to act.

Keep your device protected

Security advice to protect against polish isn’t much different than advice to protect your device against any other type of threat. Keeping your phone’s software and web browser up to date is important and will ensure many devastating attacks are prevented by the security features built into Android, iOS, Chrome, and Safari.