In Australia, Rising VoIP Attacks Mean Huge Bills For Victims 178
Posted
by
timothy
from the that's-off-the-hook dept.
from the that's-off-the-hook dept.
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."
Re:why do the 'victims' get bills? (Score:5, Informative)
If the call is proxied through the victim's poorly-configured VoIP server, no, their provider doesn't know where it actually came from.
Re:Who is placing the calls? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:When dealing with telcos... (Score:5, Informative)
G'day mate,
In Australia we dont have so called "unlimited" plans, for A$99 a month you get 1 TB of data (upload and download) on an ADSL connection. After reaching your data cap your connection is shaped to just above dialup speed (somewhere between 64K and 256K as our Luddite government still defines anything above 56K as broadband). If you want unmetered plans, expect to pay $450+ (+ == plus GST (Goods and Services Tax) which is 10%) for 2 Mbit, if you want 10 Mbit, expect to pay $1400+ for fibre.
Side note: this is why the NBN at 43 Bn AU$ (26 Bn public money) is an absolute bargain.
Now that I've clued you in about the sorry state of internet in Australia, the charges are not from downloads but from using the ISP's SIP gateway. Traffic between your router and the ISP's SIP gateway will not be metered by all but the most unscrupulous of telco's in AU. But you still pay a per call charge on VOIP because the ISP is providing a service which costs them money (calls within their network are typically free however). It would be quite easy to rack up hefty bill if you have a script that can call internationally. What the service providers should be doing is this, when a bill reaches a suspicious amount (use $150 as a yardstick for home services) then the ISP notifies the customer, once the bill reaches a second milestone (say $300) the service is suspended (incoming calls only) until the issue is rectified unless the user expressly requests otherwise.
This happens all the time in the USA as well (Score:4, Informative)