Clues in Tweets: Twitter-Guided Discovery and Analysis of SMS Spam

Understand

With its critical role in business and service delivery through mobile devices, SMS (Short Message Service) has long been abused for spamming, which is still on the rise today possibly due to the emergence of A2P bulk messaging.

• The effort to control SMS spam has been hampered by the lack of up-to-date information about illicit activities.
• In our research, we proposed a novel solution to collect recent SMS spam data, at a large scale, from Twitter, where users voluntarily report the spam messages they receive.
• For this purpose, we designed and implemented SpamHunter, an automated pipeline to discover SMS spam reporting tweets and extract message content from the attached screenshots.