Phone Hackers Stealing Billions

While the hackers in this story are the obvious bad guys, phone companies trying to enforce these outrageous bills aren't much better.

It wasn’t. 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. It would have taken 34 years for the firm to run up those charges legitimately, based on its typical phone bill, according to a complaint it filed with the Federal Communications Commission.

Click to expand...

I bet phone companies hire them.

"Bob Meldrum, vice president for corporate communications at TW Telecom, said Foreman Seeley Fountain should have better protected its equipment from hackers."

Really? In this day and age where we find huge retailers getting payment systems hit. All of the small businesses I do work with don't have the budget to put in place high tech security. In fact, most are doing well just to get complete coverage in. The FCC really needs to do something about this, and frankly, since all calls are switched anyhow, how can they not trace these things? They should be able to ferret out these hackers quickly.

If they notice this as fraud, presumably they don't pay the "premium number" owner, I mean it's not like money is instantly transferred from one point to another. Not sure how there is stealing involved. I mean if the premium number owner still pays the hacker even though they haven't gotten paid from the phones that were hacked in the first place then it's kind of their dumbass fault.

All I'll say is a phone provider should do some minimal hardening testing.

Many don't and will stick you with the bill when your oversight gets exploited.

ravx25 said:

"Bob Meldrum, vice president for corporate communications at TW Telecom, said Foreman Seeley Fountain should have better protected its equipment from hackers."

Click to expand...

What he really said is 'you should have bought a non-jailbroken iPhone instead'

The people who do this are despicable, useless, dregs of society.

B00nie said:

What he really said is 'you should have bought a non-jailbroken iPhone instead'

Click to expand...

No, their phone system needed to be set so that an outside caller can't transfer to an outside line.
I have this option blocked on the office phone system. Even if there was a need to this feature, it's usually not worth the risk of some hacker abusing your system.

It's like having your email server setup as an open SMTP relay. The hackers will eventually find it and use it to send spam/viruses.

Anti-Trust was completely hacked about 20 years ago, there's the root of the problem.