Phone hacking costs two firms £28,000
Friday 11th February 2011, 2:30PM GMT.
FRAUDSTERS have hacked into two firms’ phone answering systems and left them with bills for £28,000.
The companies targeted in the phone ‘phreaking’ attacks were in the finance and legal sectors and their systems were hijacked on Saturday and Sunday.
DS Andy Whitton (pictured), of Guernsey Police’s Commercial Fraud Department, said fraudsters guessed the password to the answerphone accounts and were then able to make calls all over the world, including to North Korea and Somalia.
‘It is a bit like the News of the World, where they dial the company and look for weakness and try and get in,’ he said.
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Should have stronger passwords then.
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My Phone bill is on the up, when i pick it up, it makes a noise like Old Tiddles used to when he had his saucer of Full Fat,i wonder if i too maybe being humped on to or hotwired ?
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I wonder if the Police will be checking the names of recently sacked employees ?
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Fraudsters robbing crooks, whats the problem?
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One in the finance sector and one legal where one would think security would be a priority. Makes you think dosen’t it.
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Sorry how do you call someone from an answerphone?
Is it not possible that messrs lawyer and finance sector forgot to hang up their phone when calling their chums abroad? Or even more likley that some disgruntled employee popped in to use the phone to save their own bill?
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The crime of “Phreaking” (hacking into a PABX and using it to route calls) actually costs UK businesses £1.3 to £1.5 billion per annum. These figures come from annual reports of the CFCA (Communication Fraud Control Association) a body who have been monitoring communication fraud since 1985.
They place the UK as one of the “top 5″ countries in the world affected by this crime.
In 2009 AT&T (the “BT” of the USA)eventually tracked down a gang of highly organised, highly funded criminals who had routed $55 million worth of illegal calls across their telephone network. During the court case, it was revealed that this gang, based in the Philippines and Italy, had a network of over 2500 telephone systems they had compromised and ready to be “brought into service” when required. Many of these telephone systems were in the UK. It was also proven that the money raised from these phreaking operations were being used to fund terrorism.
These guys are not kids messing about on a home PC. They are highly professional well funded gangs of criminals and certainly did not “guess” the passwords that allowed them access to the two telephone systems on Guernsey. They use sophisticated “war diallers” and “password crackers” to gain access.
A Phreaking attack normally involves up to 7 different compromised telephone systems linked together in a chain. Calls are routed from one system to another with the last one in the chain being used to route calls to the phreaker’s intended final destination, normally long distance international numbers.
Because the telephone systems forming the “chain” are normally spread around the globe, detection and investigation are a nightmare for the authorities and the phreakers know this only too well.
Active Voice Security software is available to protect a telephone system against a phreaking attack in the same way Anti-virus and firewall software protect a computer. However, because the whole subject has not, unbelievably, attracted media attention in the UK, even PABX installers are, in the main, ignorant of this.
This software would have prevented the two unfortunate businesses on Guernsey falling victims to this crime in the first instance.
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I really liked Eddie41′s comment
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