Samsung Electronics is formalizing plans to introduce a “Spam Message Box” on its mobile phones.
The Korea Internet & Security Agency (KISA) announced on Oct. 18 that they had entered into a business agreement with Samsung Electronics for the development and operation of malicious text message filtering services. This took place at Suwon Digital City.
KISA has initiated this collaboration with device manufacturers to prevent mobile phone text messages from being misused for illegal spam transmission or phishing. Samsung Electronics agreed on the need for a measure to minimize the risk of mobile phone users being exposed to malicious text messages.
Under this agreement, KISA will be responsible for collecting and analyzing data on spam reports. They will also verify the legality of the data before sharing it with Samsung Electronics.
Samsung Electronics, based on the data provided by KISA, will develop service features and establish the operating environment. Following this, the feature will be deployed to Samsung mobile devices.
Once the filtering service is implemented, users of Samsung mobile phones will have access to a Spam Message Box. Similar to a spam mail box in email services, suspicious messages deemed as spam will be automatically filtered and stored in a separate message box.
With the introduction of the Spam Message Box, mobile phone users will not be immediately exposed to illegal spam. It will act as an additional filter for spam that the three major telecommunications companies (SK Telecom, KT, and LG Uplus) may not have filtered out.
The collaboration with device manufacturers comes as a response to the criticism made by Park Sung-jung, a member of the National Assembly’s Science, Technology, Information, Broadcasting, and Communications Committee. Park had previously emphasized the importance of collaborating with manufacturers to provide malicious spam text filtering services on mobile devices.
According to the Korea Communications Commission, the number of mobile phone spam text reports between January and August 2023 was recorded at 160,489,346. This is a staggering increase of 6.7 times compared to last year’s total report count.
Based on data submitted to the National Assembly’s Science and Technology Committee, over the past five years the three telecommunications companies have been fined a total of 21 times for transmitting spam and advertisement-related information. LG Uplus received the most fines from 10 cases, followed by KT with 8 and SKT with 3.