North American Network Operators Group
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Re: TTY phone fraud and abuse

  • From: Patrick W.Gilmore
  • Date: Wed Apr 14 20:56:04 2004 
On Apr 11, 2004, at 6:55 PM, Sean Donelan wrote:
Can people abuse the phone system? yes, of course it can, but the
criteria for response are much higher, and in general the nature of the
network (low concurrent session limit, point to point, voice only) as it
is exposed to most people limits the damage that can be casually incurred.
There is a difference between crimes against the telephone system
and crimes using telephones.  The Department of Justice estimates
Telemarketing fraud is a $40 Billion a year problem. But telemarketing
fraud doesn't necessarily reflect a security vulnerability in the
telephone system per se.  Or at least not a security vulnerability
that can be solved solely by the telephone system.
I'm not certain why telemarketing fraud is that much different than a DDoS by zombies. The underlying network does not really have much to do with either other than supplying transport. And tightening security on the network layer wouldn't stop either from happening.

Since the major threat to networks these days is zombies, and there is very little you can do to IP to stop this from happening, why people keep commenting that IP is insecure....

--
TTFN,
patrick