Abstract

Attacks and threats against cellular devices such as botnets are becoming more and more prominent. Focusing on short message services (SMS) phishing attacks, this paper proposes the design of a cellular botnet that initiates such attack and studies its epidemic behavior using three random graphs models, namely the Barabasi–and-Albert topology (BAT), Erdos-and-Reyni topology (ERT), and Watts-and-Strogatz topology (WST). Simulation results show that: (1) Compared to BAT and WST, ERT is the best topology for enhancing the epidemic behavior of the proposed cellular botnet, (2) the BAT topology is less resilient to devices’ failures compared to the ERT and WST topologies. In the end, an effective holistic multi-tier defense strategy against the proposed epidemic SMS-based cellular botnet is presented.