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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: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Thursday March 05 2015, @03:32PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Thursday March 05 2015, @03:32PM (#153535)

    It's not a small pool of originating numbers, because the robocallers spoof the originating numbers to get around the fact that there are blacklisting services out there for phone numbers.

    And as a sibling poster points out, even if they didn't do that a legitimate call center (e.g. a utility customer service department) would look identical to a robocaller from the metadata-only viewpoint.

    --
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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2015, @06:02PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2015, @06:02PM (#153580)

    as a sibling poster points out, even if they didn't do that a legitimate call center (e.g. a utility customer service department) would look identical to a robocaller from the metadata-only viewpoint.

    Furthermore, we should expect that whatever differences in meta-data there might be would be quickly emulated by the spammers. No incoming calls? Start sending in bogus incoming calls. Duration too short? Start making long bogus calls to phone numbers under control of the spammers.

    These guys may be assholes, but to assume they aren't clever is just wishful thinking.

  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday March 06 2015, @08:23AM

    by kaszz (4211) on Friday March 06 2015, @08:23AM (#153754) Journal

    There's a difference in SS7 numbers and the one presented as caller-identification to the customer.

    One could perhaps use voice fingerprinting used in several successive calls as well.