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Mysteries of the Las Vegas Telecom System

Posted by michael on from the your-call-cannot-be-completed-as-dialed dept.

Reverend Raven writes "This is from Security Focus and deals with how some people believe a group of uber-hackers controls the Vegas telecom system. Interesting read, indeed." A follow-up to this old story. The case seems to be still winding its way through the bureaucracy.

3 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. From reading the article by phaze3000 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    callers from outside Vegas, or from payphones and cell phones, get through, he says, but hotel callers frequently get false busy signals, or reach silence

    This sounds to me like systematic hacking of hotel telephone exchanges, so assuming Sprint isn't responsible for these (I don't see why it would be) I'm really not sure that this is Sprint's fault or problem.

    --
    Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
  2. Uberhackers==police? by rufusdufus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It seems likely to me that the so-called uber hackers are really the police. Look at the the people involved in this: pimps and smut sellers and Gambino's [and somehow Kevin Mitnik]. The mobsters were caught in a sting when they tried to "muscle-in" on the phone racket. They could only have been caught if the Law knew what was going on.

    Last time I went to Vegas, it was much cleaned up from several years ago. Almost no porn and fewer hooker adds. Used to be you couldnt see the sidewalk for them. I say the police did it by jamming the unsavory's phones.

  3. No - the switch has been hacked. by Innominate+Recreant · · Score: 5, Informative
    I write telephony software. It's not the hacking of hotel telephone exchanges - it's the hacking of the swtiches at the telco. When you make a telephone call, the telco not only sends the ANI (caller id - phone number) it sends infodigits - a two-digit number identifying the type of phone from which you are calling - a residential phone, a hotel, payphone, prison, etc. It's very easy to program a switch to reroute calls to a particular DNIS based on infodigits so that if someone at a payphone calls 800-555-1234 the call goes through, but if someone from a hotel calls the same DNIS, it gets routed to a different DNIS, or goes to reorder. It's equally easy to create a conference on the switch, allowing a third party to "listen in" to call - explaining the appearance of one his competitor's "dancers" at a customer's hotel room.

    This is what the plaintiff in the story is alleging - that Sprint's switches are being reprogrammed by uberhackers in the employ of the Mob or some other competing organizations.