The Necessity of Designing Effective Trust Indicators for Mobile Communication Applications to Enhance User Security and Confidence

The Pew Research Center reports that 98% of consumers in the US use mobile phones, making them vulnerable to SMiShing attacks. However, countermeasures for social engineering attacks on mobile messaging applications have not been fully addressed, resulting in ineffectual solutions and gaps that may erode users’ trust and confidence in their mobile devices. Despite numerous mobile applications offering security and privacy tools, text messages often lack successful cues to indicate the presence of suspicious and genuine messages, failing to prompt appropriate behavior changes. Consequently, the lack of awareness and knowledge about these attacks leads to more security mistakes due to human errors. This literature review examines the current state of mobile security, emphasizing the necessity of enhancing mobile interfaces to combat SMiShing attacks. Faklaris et al.’s preliminary results and systematic literature review suggest that college students aged 18–25 and women are most susceptible to SMiShing compared to individuals with security training or those frequently exposed to threats. As data breaches persist, there is a pressing need for mobile companies, regulators, and mobile phone carriers to implement effective visual trust indicators to help protect those vulnerable to SMiShing.