Title
HearMeOut: detecting voice phishing activities in Android
Abstract
BSTRACTIn South Korea, voice phishing has been proliferating with the advent of voice phishing apps: the number of annual victims had risen to 34,527 in 2020, representing financial losses of approximately 598 million USD. However, the voice phishing functionalities that these abusive apps implement are largely understudied. To this end, we analyze 1,017 voice phishing apps and reveal new phishing functionalities: outgoing call redirection, call screen overlay, and fake call voice. We find that call redirection that changes the intended recipients of victims' outgoing calls plays a critical role in facilitating voice phishing; our user study shows that 87% of the participants did not notice that their intended recipients were changed when call redirection occurred. We further investigate implementations of these fatal functionalities to distinguish their malicious behaviors from their corresponding behaviors in benign apps. We then propose HearMeOut, an Android system-level service that detects phishing behaviors that phishing apps conduct in runtime and blocks the detected behaviors. HearMeOut achieves high accuracy with no false positives or negatives in classifying phishing behaviors while exhibiting an unnoticeable latency of 0.36 ms on average. Our user study demonstrates that HearMeOut is able to prevent 100% of participants from being phished by providing active warnings. Our work facilitates a better understanding of recent voice phishing and proposes practical mitigation with recommendations for Android system changes.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1145/3498361.3538939
Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Joongyum Kim100.34
Jihwan Kim2273.36
Seongil Wi301.35
Yongdae Kim41944125.44
Sooel Son522411.71