In Australia, Rising VoIP Attacks Mean Huge Bills For Victims

mask.of.sanity writes with this excerpt from ZDNet Australia: "Australian network companies have told of clients receiving phone bills including $100,000 worth of unauthorised calls placed over compromised VoIP servers. Smaller attacks have netted criminals tens of thousands of dollars worth of calls. A Perth business was hit with a $120,000 bill after hackers exploited its VoIP server to place some 11,000 calls over 46 hours last year. ... Local network providers and the SANs Institute have reported recent spikes in Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) scanning — a process to identify poorly configured VoIP systems — and brute-force attacks against publicly-accessible SIP systems, notably on UDP port 5060."

This happened to me

[randallman]

So I setup an account that was easy to hack into. It plays back screaming monkey sounds (included with Asterisk) to the caller and records the conversation. Most of the time, the caller is a machine, but a few times I've had a real person on the line and those were interesting.

Re:The REAL crime here

[mcrbids]

PPS: AT&T waived almost all of that $1,000 when I tried to cancel my account with them. After they did so, I waited a month before canceling service. They overcharged me $20 on my very next bill!

Friends don't let friends use AT&T!