Mesfin, Kifle (PhD)Tarikua, Worku2018-12-212023-11-042018-12-212023-11-042018-11http://etd.aau.edu.et/handle/123456789/15248Telecommunication fraud is remaining challenging since the beginning of commercial telecom service. There are various reasons that makes telecom fraud mitigation inefficient. Some of them are; integration of new technologies without evaluating the security hole, lack of knowledges on the fraud root causes, the changing behavior of fraud and effective use of mitigation techniques. Short Message Service (SMS) is one of the main and victim telecom services. A variety of technologies, services and actors are involved on SMS ecosystem. This technology diversity makes the service vulnerable for different type of messaging frauds. In this study SMS fraud mitigation taxonomy is proposed to improve fraud mitigation deployment method. The taxonomy is constructed from four main nodes namely Technology (Which), Vulnerability (Where), Fraud (How) and Mitigation (What) as a cause and effect way. These main nodes are also categorized in to three sub technological layers which are network/protocol, service and actor. In addition to this classification the mitigation techniques are characterized as technical and none technical. The evaluation process is done first selecting 100,000 fraudulent short message records from ethio telecom. Then taking appropriate mitigation techniques from Network /protocol, Service and Actor layers. Finally, the selected records are examined by each layer mitigation techniques based on the fraud scheme. The layered evaluation result confirmed the proposed approach can mitigate 70% of the fraud messages at network and protocol level, 57.2% at service level, and 84% at actor level before any impact. So that overall efficiency of this taxonomy based layered mitigation approach is recommended to use, instead of detecting the fraud after impacting the service.en-USTaxonomySMS fraudMitigation techniquesTechnologyVulnerabilityThesis