Phone Hacking

Phone pole with phone and mainly electric lines (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The terrorism angle to this nuisance should get people's attention. But this is also a major way we are seeing world governance has not kept up with the internet. Technology is ahead of politics. Law enforcement is like computers not connected to the internet, existing in all their national silos.

Phone Hackers Dial and Redial to Steal Billions

Bob Foreman’s architecture firm ran up a $166,000 phone bill in a single weekend last March. But neither Mr. Foreman nor anyone else at his seven-person company was in the office at the time. ...... Hackers had broken into the phone network of the company, Foreman Seeley Fountain Architecture, and routed $166,000 worth of calls from the firm to premium-rate telephone numbers in Gambia, Somalia and the Maldives. ...... now that most corporate phone lines run over the Internet. .... affects mostly small businesses and cost victims $4.73 billion globally last year. ...... no regulations require carriers to reimburse customers for fraud the way credit card companies must ....... Hackers sign up to lease premium-rate phone numbers, often used for sexual-chat or psychic lines, from one of dozens of web-based services that charge dialers over $1 a minute and give the lessee a cut......... Hackers then break into a business’s phone system and make calls through it to their premium number, typically over a weekend, when nobody is there to notice. With high-speed computers, they can make hundreds of calls simultaneously, forwarding as many as 220 minutes’ worth of phone calls a minute to the pay line. The hacker gets a cut of the charges, typically delivered through a Western Union, MoneyGram or wire transfer. ....... Catching the criminals is difficult because the crime can cross as many as three jurisdictions. In 2011, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and police in the Philippines arrested four men who used the scheme to make $2 million in fraudulent calls; revenue was directed to a Saudi Arabian militant group that United States officials believe financed the 2008 Mumbai terrorist bombings. ......... “If you put a computer on the Internet, it immediately starts getting probed for a weak point.” ....... advise people to turn off call forwarding and set up strong passwords for their voice mail systems and for placing international calls....... “People don’t realize their phone is a six-figure liability waiting to happen”

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