Understanding SMS Spam in a Large Cellular Network: Characteristics, Strategies and Defenses

In this paper, using a year (June 2011 to May 2012) of user reported SMS spam messages together with SMS network records collected from a large US based cellular carrier, we carry out a comprehensive study of SMS spamming. Our analysis shows various characteristics of SMS spamming activities, such as spamming rates, victim selection strategies and spatial clustering of spam numbers. Our analysis also reveals that spam numbers with similar content exhibit strong similarity in terms of their sending patterns, tenure, devices and geolocations. Using the insights we have learned from our analysis, we propose several novel spam defense solutions. For example, we devise a novel algorithm for detecting related spam numbers. The algorithm incorporates user spam reports and identifies additional (unreported) spam number candidates which exhibit similar sending patterns at the same network location of the reported spam number during the nearby time period. The algorithm yields a high accuracy of 99.4% on real network data. Moreover, 72% of these spam numbers are detected at least 10 hours before user reports.