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FTC to Award $25,000 for the Best Honeypot Design to Trap Robocalls

posted by mrcoolbp on Thursday March 05 2015, @10:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the flies-with-honey dept.

n1 writes:

Ars Technica reports:

On Wednesday, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced another contest to design a system to "identify unwanted robocalls received on landlines or mobile phones, and block and forward those calls to a honeypot." The agency will select "up to five contestants" as part of what it’s calling "Robocalls: Humanity Strikes Back."

The first qualifying phase launches Wednesday and runs through June 15, 2015 at 10:00pm Eastern Time, while the final phase concludes at DEF CON 23 on August 9, 2015.

Here's the FTC contest page. There's another similar contest (with no cash prize) being held "as part of the National Day of Civic Hacking." It appears they have done something similar in previous years as well.

 
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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by MrGuy on Thursday March 05 2015, @03:05PM

    by MrGuy (1007) on Thursday March 05 2015, @03:05PM (#153522)

    A small pool of originating numbers that calls a large pool of numbers within a short time. Just identify that source pool and block them?

    Except that this also describes outgoing call centers, which have a variety of legitimate purposes. For example, a customer service team that contacts customers with problem orders placed online would look similar (small number of outgoing numbers, large number of contacted numbers, frequent calls, many short duration calls because a lot of the time you'll get voicemail....)

    Not saying it's not possible to identify "highly likely to be robocalling" by data mining, just that there's a difference between "a lot of outbound calls" and "robocalls"

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by kaszz on Thursday March 05 2015, @03:15PM

    by kaszz (4211) on Thursday March 05 2015, @03:15PM (#153525) Journal

    Add call length to the data mining? Lack of anyone calling back etc..