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Fraud hits some VoIP service providers

  • 22-03-2007 4:43pm
    #1
    probe
    Closed Accounts Posts: 2,055 ✭✭✭


    Story from The Register:

    VoIP phreakers establish thriving black market

    Sneakers
    By John Leyden → More by this author
    Published Thursday 22nd March 2007 13:59 GMT
    Telephone systems hackers have established a thriving black market in reselling stolen VoIP minutes.

    Hackers are breaking into gateway servers used to connect a carrier's phone network to the internet and reselling this access to smaller, unscrupulous operators, sometimes via web-based wholesale minutes markets. Wholesale purchasers of the purloined access are often small telco operations who resell access to ordinary punters via printed phone cards.

    These telephone phreakers steal 200m minutes a month, worth $26m, estimates New York telecom firm Stealth Communications.

    Telecoms fraud is a well known, if under-reported problem, that pre-dates the internet by years. It is a multimillion-dollar business, with estimates of direct damages resulting from fraud varying from $35bn to $40bn a year.

    This fraud comes in many guises of which the growing trade in VoIP phreaking is just one relatively small but growing component. Newsweek reports that uncovering the perpetrators of this illicit trade is extremely difficult, if not impossible.

    A Panamanian telco that recently lost $110,000 as a result of VoIP fraud hired Hong Kong consultancy TSTF to track down the phreakers involved. The trail led through Bulgaria, Canada, Costa Rica, Hong Kong, and the US before going cold. Phreaker trails are far too complex to track successfully, Emmanuel Gadaix, head of TSTF, told . ®

    http://www.theregister.com/2007/03/22/voip_fraud/


Comments

  • #2
    parsi
    Site Banned Posts: 5,904 ✭✭✭parsi


    Any chance of reducing the font size ?


  • #3
    Cabaal
    Moderators, Technology & Internet Moderators, Regional South East Moderators Posts: 28,536 Mod ✭✭✭✭Cabaal


    parsi wrote:
    Any chance of reducing the font size ?

    Done :D


  • #4
    matrim
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 7,518 ✭✭✭matrim


    It's not really anything new. Many gateways only require a special prefix to be added befoe the number to use them.

    Out of about 10 gateways that I use, they all use this to tell the user and 3 of them don't lock their gateway to the IP of the SIP Proxy, and because they don't use sips it would be easy for someone to get this prefix.

    I can see alot of providers starting to move more towards the use of SIPS as use of VoIP becomes more widespread.

    SIP proxies are often harder to crack, but digest authentication can be broken so it's not impossible.


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