Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by cmn32480 on Saturday August 06 2016, @06:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the get-robocop-on-them dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

New data shows that the majority of robot-enabled scam phone calls came from fewer than 40 call centers, a finding that offers hope the growing menace of robocalls can be stopped.

The calls use computers and the Internet to dial thousands of phone numbers every minute and promote fraudulent schemes that promise to lower credit card interest rates, offer loans, and sell home security products, to name just a few of the scams. Over the past decade, robocall complaints have mushroomed, with the Federal Trade Commission often receiving hundreds of thousands of complaints each month. In 2013, the consumer watchdog agency awarded $50,000 to three groups who devised blocking systems that had the potential to help end the scourge. Three years later, however, the robocall problem seems as intractable as ever.

On Thursday at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, a researcher said that slightly more than half of more than 1 million robocalls tracked were sent by just 38 telephony infrastructures. The relatively small number of actors offers hope that the phenomenon can be rooted out, by either automatically blocking the call centers or finding ways for law enforcement groups to identify and prosecute the operators.

"We know that the majority of robocalls only come from 38 different infrastructures," Aude Marzuoli, research scientist at a company called Pindrop Labs, told Ars. "It's not as if there are thousands of people out there doing this. If you can catch this small number of bad actors we can" stop the problem."

Pindrop researchers reached the conclusion by creating a security honeypot of phone numbers that received more than 1 million robocalls. The researchers transcribed about 10 percent of the calls and analyzed the semantics with machine-learning techniques to isolate identical scams. The researchers combined those results with analysis that tracked 150 different audio features of each call. By studying the codecs, packet loss, spectrum, and frequency inside the audio and combining the results with the machine learning, the researchers were able to obtain a fingerprint of each different call center.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 1) by anubi on Sunday August 07 2016, @08:26AM

    by anubi (2828) on Sunday August 07 2016, @08:26AM (#384918) Journal

    My phone plan from AT&T charges me something like $10/month plus $2 for any day the phone is actually used to originate or receive a call.

    I would love to have the plan amended so that if its a telemarketer calling, HE is billed the $2 if I do not press "*" to accept the charge.

    That way, I do not get dinged $2 for answering a robocall. As far as I am concerned, a business robocalling me has just robbed me of $2 if I show the courtesy of answering his call. When the recording industry appeared before Congress over what they considered theft of a song ( retailing at the time for about a buck ), Congress listened and acted.

    I am getting hit as well by uninvited calls, with approximately equal loss. But what will Congress do?

    Or, what would be practical for Congress to do about it?

    Personally, I have just about resigned that this problem, just like copyright infringement, is quite impractical to enforce, and the best thing is to simply sweep both under the rug and tolerate it. I feel my suing some telemarketer $180,000 for a deliberately placed phone call that got traced is just about as asinine as suing some kid $180,000 for a song. Only Congress seems to take this kind of hogwash seriously.

    The only thing I can come up with at the present is whitelist/greylist/blacklist technology, where anyone on the whitelist gets the phone to ring for them, the greylist gets the opportunity to leave a message, and the blacklist gets "this number is not in service" message. If the number calling is not on any of the lists, it is simply logged as a "missed call", with the caller-ID is correlated against databases maintained by several websites to ascertain if that number is known to be spewing phone spam.

    Personally, I feel the carriers should maintain the caller-ID system, allowing private PBX to assign Caller-ID knowing full good and well the carrier is going to prefix an asterisk to the code signifying the contents is not coming from a verified source. I believe most of us know that at the present, Caller-ID is quite spoof-able - and people can put any number and identifying information they want on your display - there is no requisite that the information displayed has even the slightest semblance to reality.

    When I do the statistics on my phone, I find over 95% of my incoming calls are phone spam.

    --
    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]