Friday, February 18, 2005

Spam Gets Vocal With VoIP



I thought it was bad now, as it is my house phone, which only 20 people have the number for and I have had for less than 3 months rings 4 or 5 times a day, some times no one is there other times it's a recorded messages trying to convince me I have won a prize and all I need to do is ring up a number that cost £50 a second to claim my £2.99 child's watch.

I don't think I could cope with being rung up 5 times a day and being told my dick is not big enuth and I must take herbal pill's NOW to make it bigger in just 30 days.

The register reports that spammer's have now got there eyes on VOIP,

Internet telephony means cheaper phone calls, a great prospect for consumers and businesses alike. It also means that advertising messages can be sent out for next to nothing. And history shows that spammers will take advantage of any broadcast medium available to them, according to Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer at Counterpane Internet Security.
Now I rang BT and complained about all these calls and they gave me some numbers to ring to get my phone number on the do not call list. Which stopped the calls from the UK but has not and will not stop the large Indian call centers that just ring numbers at random and are not covered by UK law.

BT says they are working on this but at the moment there is no way to stop an international call. Now if Tel marketing can simple go off shore whats to stop these new SPIT (Spam over internet telephony) call's from messaging you from over seas where the bandwidth is cheaper?

According to David Thomason, director of security engineering at network security firm Sourcefire, Spit messages would likely have a pattern. Junk calls matching that pattern could be blocked in much the same way malign data traffic can be discarded providing filtering technologies were deployed on the network Spit messages are sent from, he said.
Now they may say there will be a pattern but only if they are sent out in a pattern I am sure that any programmer worth their salt can make some thing random enuth to bypass this.

For now while VOIP is not that popular we are safe but for how long?


The Register

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