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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, Interesting) by fatuous looser on Thursday March 05 2015, @05:12PM

    by fatuous looser (2550) on Thursday March 05 2015, @05:12PM (#153566)

    Gee, where is there already a gigantic honeypot up & running?  The one that sucks down every little upstream photon from every corner of the globe?  Lemme think.  Oh, that would be the Bluffdale facility in Utah.  Works great for blackmail & industrial espionage.  We just LOVE it for that here in Amerika.  A technological wonderment, it is.

    We already know where the robocallers will be phoning to next.  Right here at my house, this very evening, as one simple example.  Why not fashion some robo-tracing "algorithms" for our lovely panopticon surveillance machine & document every detail of the robocalling activity with that?

    We spent billions on the Bluffdale dragnet.  Let's use it for something worthwhile, for a change.

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  • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday March 05 2015, @06:43PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Thursday March 05 2015, @06:43PM (#153590) Journal

    Jesus man, stop giving them ideas of how to make the general public *support* their behavior!