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FBI Warns on VOIP Attacks
05/21/2010
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Eric Krapf, Editor, May 20, 2010
I recently heard from Mark Collier, CTO at SecureLogix and one of the industry's security gurus. He pointed me to a recent FBI press release on a growing VOIP-driven security threat: Denial-of-service attacks that are launched as a way of masking separate identity theft or other types of fraud attacks.
According to the FBI, scammers flood a victim's phone number with phony calls while they're also accessing that person's account at a financial institution or other company. That way, if the illegal access trips some kind of verification call out to the victim, that verification call can't get through because the line is blocked by what is essentially VOIP spam.
In expanding on the FBI's warning, Mark pointed out that the attacks themselves--both the telephony DoS and the subsequent identity theft--don't rely on VOIP in and of itself. In other words, you could, in theory, flood a call center with calls generated out of a TDM system. It's just that VOIP lets you do it a lot cheaper. Remember, spam is cost-effective because it's so cheap to email millions of people; if even a handful of people fall for the spammer's pitch, he's ahead of the game. VOIP simply applies that principle to the voice medium.
Read the full article at NoJitter.com... |
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