VOIP voicemail hacked aka DISA toll fraud
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@magicmarker said in VOIP voicemail hacked aka DISA toll fraud:
Thank you for your comments Scott and Jared. This is what I needed. I will asking about putting some sort of stoppage on long distance calls so they don't rack up like this. This should be turned on by default for customers to prevent this. Unbelievable.
Yes, when it happened to us, all of the fraud was to Libya. Why was Libya turned on? Because we simply had never thought about it. Now we think about that a lot.
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@magicmarker said in VOIP voicemail hacked aka DISA toll fraud:
@scottalanmiller said in VOIP voicemail hacked aka DISA toll fraud:
@magicmarker said in VOIP voicemail hacked aka DISA toll fraud:
Ok, the voicemail PINs were weak which caused the toll fraud.
This, I think, answers everything. If the PINs were weak, and they weren't chosen by the provider, I see no grey area. This particular instance appears to be both legally and ethically completely on the end customer. Ensuring proper security from the end user's (employee's) perspective cannot be that of the provider.
Unless they were told that they had to do this and had the authority and expectation of firing offenders, there is no way for that to be on them. The party hiring and managing the people choosing the PINs is the responsible party.
In regards to this statement. The voicemail policy was set by the VOIP provider. The default voicemail password they pushed out to all the handsets was 1234. So it seems I do have some ground to stand on.
The policy doesn't matter. Were they given the ability to fire people if they didn't follow the policy? What power were they given to police the PINs? What did the policy state?
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@magicmarker said in VOIP voicemail hacked aka DISA toll fraud:
This should be turned on by default for customers to prevent this. Unbelievable.
Well, this is a tough position. Having this on or off is a "feature" offered by different providers. If you want it on by default, there are providers like voip.ms (that Jared and I recommend often) that provide that. Others provide international calling by default.
No matter how you slice or dice it, that choice is one made by the person who selected the provider. Most providers that allow the calling by default, still allow you to shut it off optionally. So there are two layers of protection already - selecting a provider with defaults you want, and then changing the defaults to match your security profile. And there is always the chance that they are off by default, but someone, at some point, said "I want international calling, turn that on!"
Allowing phone calls to International is typically on by default and can't be something to fault the carrier on. I prefer off by default, too. But preferring it doesn't change whose responsibility it is.
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@magicmarker said in VOIP voicemail hacked aka DISA toll fraud:
@scottalanmiller said in VOIP voicemail hacked aka DISA toll fraud:
@magicmarker said in VOIP voicemail hacked aka DISA toll fraud:
Ok, the voicemail PINs were weak which caused the toll fraud.
This, I think, answers everything. If the PINs were weak, and they weren't chosen by the provider, I see no grey area. This particular instance appears to be both legally and ethically completely on the end customer. Ensuring proper security from the end user's (employee's) perspective cannot be that of the provider.
Unless they were told that they had to do this and had the authority and expectation of firing offenders, there is no way for that to be on them. The party hiring and managing the people choosing the PINs is the responsible party.
In regards to this statement. The voicemail policy was set by the VOIP provider. The default voicemail password they pushed out to all the handsets was 1234. So it seems I do have some ground to stand on.
Um. . . what? I can almost guarantee that their policy was we set a default and your users are expected to change it when they first use it.
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@DustinB3403 said in VOIP voicemail hacked aka DISA toll fraud:
@magicmarker said in VOIP voicemail hacked aka DISA toll fraud:
This should be turned on by default for customers to prevent this. Unbelievable.
And what happens when the business needs to make a legitimate long distance call and can't? Then the customer complains to the provider and other issues ensue.
Right, this is why most do "on" by default. And why most that are off by default end up turned on anyway.
I like how easily voip.ms let's me turn it on and off, and by single country. Like we had to run interviews in Panama two weeks ago, so we turned on Panamanian calling. But it is like $.50 a minute! So as soon as the interviews were done, we turned it off again.
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@DustinB3403 said in VOIP voicemail hacked aka DISA toll fraud:
@magicmarker said in VOIP voicemail hacked aka DISA toll fraud:
@scottalanmiller said in VOIP voicemail hacked aka DISA toll fraud:
@magicmarker said in VOIP voicemail hacked aka DISA toll fraud:
Ok, the voicemail PINs were weak which caused the toll fraud.
This, I think, answers everything. If the PINs were weak, and they weren't chosen by the provider, I see no grey area. This particular instance appears to be both legally and ethically completely on the end customer. Ensuring proper security from the end user's (employee's) perspective cannot be that of the provider.
Unless they were told that they had to do this and had the authority and expectation of firing offenders, there is no way for that to be on them. The party hiring and managing the people choosing the PINs is the responsible party.
In regards to this statement. The voicemail policy was set by the VOIP provider. The default voicemail password they pushed out to all the handsets was 1234. So it seems I do have some ground to stand on.
Um. . . what? I can almost guarantee that their policy was we set a default and your users are expected to change it when they first use it.
That's what I would expect it to read as.
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@DustinB3403 said in VOIP voicemail hacked aka DISA toll fraud:
@magicmarker said in VOIP voicemail hacked aka DISA toll fraud:
@scottalanmiller said in VOIP voicemail hacked aka DISA toll fraud:
@magicmarker said in VOIP voicemail hacked aka DISA toll fraud:
Ok, the voicemail PINs were weak which caused the toll fraud.
This, I think, answers everything. If the PINs were weak, and they weren't chosen by the provider, I see no grey area. This particular instance appears to be both legally and ethically completely on the end customer. Ensuring proper security from the end user's (employee's) perspective cannot be that of the provider.
Unless they were told that they had to do this and had the authority and expectation of firing offenders, there is no way for that to be on them. The party hiring and managing the people choosing the PINs is the responsible party.
In regards to this statement. The voicemail policy was set by the VOIP provider. The default voicemail password they pushed out to all the handsets was 1234. So it seems I do have some ground to stand on.
Um. . . what? I can almost guarantee that their policy was we set a default and your users are expected to change it when they first use it.
Good point. Yes, the user needed to change the PIN after first login.
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@scottalanmiller said in VOIP voicemail hacked aka DISA toll fraud:
@DustinB3403 said in VOIP voicemail hacked aka DISA toll fraud:
@magicmarker said in VOIP voicemail hacked aka DISA toll fraud:
@scottalanmiller said in VOIP voicemail hacked aka DISA toll fraud:
@magicmarker said in VOIP voicemail hacked aka DISA toll fraud:
Ok, the voicemail PINs were weak which caused the toll fraud.
This, I think, answers everything. If the PINs were weak, and they weren't chosen by the provider, I see no grey area. This particular instance appears to be both legally and ethically completely on the end customer. Ensuring proper security from the end user's (employee's) perspective cannot be that of the provider.
Unless they were told that they had to do this and had the authority and expectation of firing offenders, there is no way for that to be on them. The party hiring and managing the people choosing the PINs is the responsible party.
In regards to this statement. The voicemail policy was set by the VOIP provider. The default voicemail password they pushed out to all the handsets was 1234. So it seems I do have some ground to stand on.
Um. . . what? I can almost guarantee that their policy was we set a default and your users are expected to change it when they first use it.
That's what I would expect it to read as.
It's the same policy that Verizon and company use for all of their customers, business and otherwise. You get a default which might be the last 4 of the number, and when you first login you're required to change it.
Even if you put in the same 4 digits, it's on you the user at that point and not the carrier.
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@magicmarker said in VOIP voicemail hacked aka DISA toll fraud:
@DustinB3403 said in VOIP voicemail hacked aka DISA toll fraud:
@magicmarker said in VOIP voicemail hacked aka DISA toll fraud:
@scottalanmiller said in VOIP voicemail hacked aka DISA toll fraud:
@magicmarker said in VOIP voicemail hacked aka DISA toll fraud:
Ok, the voicemail PINs were weak which caused the toll fraud.
This, I think, answers everything. If the PINs were weak, and they weren't chosen by the provider, I see no grey area. This particular instance appears to be both legally and ethically completely on the end customer. Ensuring proper security from the end user's (employee's) perspective cannot be that of the provider.
Unless they were told that they had to do this and had the authority and expectation of firing offenders, there is no way for that to be on them. The party hiring and managing the people choosing the PINs is the responsible party.
In regards to this statement. The voicemail policy was set by the VOIP provider. The default voicemail password they pushed out to all the handsets was 1234. So it seems I do have some ground to stand on.
Um. . . what? I can almost guarantee that their policy was we set a default and your users are expected to change it when they first use it.
Good point. Yes, the user needed to change the PIN after first login.
That's what'll get you, I'm afraid. It sounds like the phone provider had a good policy, but policing it had to fall to your HR department or whatever. Unless the phone company had the power and authority and responsibility to see, verify, punish, etc. with customers, there's no way for them to be in the line of accountability. And even if they had all those things, they'd have to agree to provide indemnity on top of that, which they would never agree to, because the Cisco boxes aren't all that secure and if they get hacked that's not their fault nor something they can prevent. And even good PINs can be hacked.
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There is another aspect, too. And that is that there is such a thing as reverse toll fraud. Meaning, you make a bunch of somewhat unusual calls, rack up a crazy bill, then try to not pay it by claiming it was toll fraud. The phone provider can't tell that the calls were legit (which is why their alarms aren't very useful, either.) They can sometimes tell that they are abnormal for you on a client by client basis, but that requires some serious software to determine. And unusual isn't the same and "not legit."
So one of the reason that they never offer indemnity is because 99% of the time that "hack" can't be traced to anyone, and so they can't tell the difference between a hacked customer and a customer that is just trying to not pay their bill.
Compare it to someone breaking into your house, hopping on your computer, and surfing some websites. The website can tell that you don't often go to that website, but it has no way to know that it is or isn't you.
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There are only 10k 4 digit pin combo's anyways. It's never been a very secure mechanism, and without some sort of lockout for too many bad guesses, it's trivial to break any pin.
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@Donahue most phone systems have a lockout function enabled. If this phone system did or didn't I don't know. But I also don't know if a 4 digit pin was the maximum length a pin could be.
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@DustinB3403 said in VOIP voicemail hacked aka DISA toll fraud:
@Donahue most phone systems have a lockout function enabled. If this phone system did or didn't I don't know. But I also don't know if a 4 digit pin was the maximum length a pin could be.
true
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@Donahue said in VOIP voicemail hacked aka DISA toll fraud:
There are only 10k 4 digit pin combo's anyways. It's never been a very secure mechanism, and without some sort of lockout for too many bad guesses, it's trivial to break any pin.
Assuming it's a four digit limit. If so, that's on Cisco, at least that part of it.
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Not all phone systems let you rack up long distance via voicemail, either.
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@scottalanmiller said in VOIP voicemail hacked aka DISA toll fraud:
@Donahue said in VOIP voicemail hacked aka DISA toll fraud:
There are only 10k 4 digit pin combo's anyways. It's never been a very secure mechanism, and without some sort of lockout for too many bad guesses, it's trivial to break any pin.
Assuming it's a four digit limit. If so, that's on Cisco, at least that part of it.
Which honestly wouldn't be surprising. . .
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On this subject, Twilio blocks almost everything not NANPA by default.
I just checked, this is all you can call
North America: US & Canada
South America: Brazil
Europe: France, Germany, United Kingdom
Asia: India, Israel, Japan
Oceania: Australia/Cocos/Christmas Island -
The documentation for the Cisco Unity system says there are policies that can be set for the voicemail pin, including minimum length, the duration an account is locked, if an admin has to manually unlock an account etc.
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@JaredBusch said in VOIP voicemail hacked aka DISA toll fraud:
This is one of the reasons I never setup automatic funding on SIP trunks.
The account will run out of money before things get super out of control.
I have adopted this same belief. My customer who I managed their phones asked me if we could just setup auto billing - I told them yes, but then they were at the mercy of hackers if they were hacked and how high the bills would be.
In this case, the customer decided that 4 months of normal billing would be tolerable to loose if hacked versus having to refresh the money more often than 3 times a year.i.e. let's say they spend $50/m normally. They will preload the account with $200 which should last 4 months. Now they only have to add more money three times a year, not monthly.
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@Dashrender said in VOIP voicemail hacked aka DISA toll fraud:
@JaredBusch said in VOIP voicemail hacked aka DISA toll fraud:
This is one of the reasons I never setup automatic funding on SIP trunks.
The account will run out of money before things get super out of control.
I have adopted this same belief. My customer who I managed their phones asked me if we could just setup auto billing - I told them yes, but then they were at the mercy of hackers if they were hacked and how high the bills would be.
In this case, the customer decided that 4 months of normal billing would be tolerable to loose if hacked versus having to refresh the money more often than 3 times a year.i.e. let's say they spend $50/m normally. They will preload the account with $200 which should last 4 months. Now they only have to add more money three times a year, not monthly.
Correct. that is how I handle it wit clients. they determine how much to pre-load, but I never let them turn on auto-renew without signing a waiver of liability. So far no one has signed it.
