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Telus Puts A Stop To 'Modem Hijacking'
TheIonix writes "Telus, a major telco in Canada, decided to block long distance direct-dialed calls to four countries to help reduce dial-up 'modem hijacking'. The article explains: 'When the [dial-up] user downloads [certain malware programs], the downloaded file accesses software on their computer and causes the modem to dial phone numbers in foreign countries, resulting in long distance charges.' 4 countries were targeted: Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Nauru and Sao Tome. It is still possible to call to those countries with the operator assistance and the fees are waived. Now let's see if this nice idea will be followed by others."
Commonly, the way that these international calling scams work is that the monopoly carrier of the foriegn country charges obscenely high rates by most standards, and then the malware writer leases lines close to the point of entry so that the carrier doesn't have to do much work once the call enters their system. The malware writer is then given a piece of the international call toll for attracting the business.
In short, the phone companies in these developing nations are usually in on the scheme and profit just as much as the malware operators do from the increased call volume. They have no interest in stopping calls that way.
I wouldn't be opposed to giving such companies an international telecom death penality of simply not routing calls their way. If the only phone operator in a country can't properly keep scam artists out of their network, and furthermore aids such scam artists, that country really doesn't have much of a phone system to begin with... an electronic embargo might get the government there to get a clue.
Now to figure out a way to do something very similar for SPAM!!
Granted auto dialers to these countries will no longer function, but I suppose the loss of the one customer who regularly dials Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Nauru and/or Sao Tome in Canada vs. the gazillions of mad people for bum phone bills weighs itself out. However let's see them try this with a bigger country having auto dial issues as well (Thailand, Vietnam and former Russian republics come to mind). A step in the right direction, but not hardly a full solution.
...in bed
Telus needed to do something, I know from experience that this is a serious problem. 16 dollars for some call to africa i never placed, I had no idea about this stuff, fortunately Linux is immune to these things. Here's an idea: Don't hook up the phone line to the computer unless you plan on going online. That way if one of those stupid dialers fire up, its evil plan will get foiled.
What about calls to "disputed zone", maybe malware writers really want to find out which way the toilet water goes when it's flushed.
Why not just have a system that speaks some digits and waits for you to punch them back in for verification? I doubt this software is going to figure out the drivers for your voice modem and do speech recognition.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Nice? I thought that any act by government restricting our freedom, no matter how benevolent their intent, was a bad thing.
How bout they focus on educating the public about malware instead?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
> Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Nauru and Sao Tome.
Do these countries really exists ? Never ever heard of them.
I'm glad Nigeria isn't being blocked, I have to contact Dr. Mbugo Mbongo to see how my wire transfer went.
Trolling is a art,
900 number operators could use this method to scam people for money...
The Digital Couture Collection
If not a bit late, though seems like the wrong approach to the problem, but perhaps as much as the phone company can do about it.
;-)
Of course, I personally haven't seen a modem in years...
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
It only affects their customers, and only with malware dialing to four specific countries.
With that kind of sensationalist headline, you'd think they released a benevolent worm that safeguards against hijacking.
Seriously, is following the money, reversing the charges and putting the people responsible behind bars all that difficult?
Operator: How may I direct your call?
Customer: Squeeechhllcshhsh
Operator: You want to be connected to Guinea-Bissau?
Customer: Squeeeeelch
Operator: One moment while I connect you.
See, it won't help. :)
I understand that this is a telco company doing this, not government, but my point is still the same. Restrictions should be a last resort.
Telus's CallGate service costs $3.95 (Canadian, of course) and gives the option configure it to block 1-900 calls, toll calls, a list of 25 specific numbers or such.
It's interesting that they're asking people to pay to be not able to dial given numbers. You'd think a hardware device on the user's side could provide the same functionality for less...
Just make people dial a PIN number in front of the number, instead of going through the operator? Thus most people will never care they can't call those countries and the ones that do can still do so without the operator (faxing must be a PITA!)
Or make people use calling cards for those countries?
make the programs dial different countries. simple.
then the telcos will block those countries...
until we need operator assistance to dial anything!
(extreme)
telia, the major telecom company here have created software (free to download from their site) for ms windows that blocks mode hijacking attempts.
Seems like this problem may soon be eliminated by obsolescence.
For one, do you really think they were giving people refunds for these charges? Maybe Canada has some consumer protection laws or something, but from my dealings with scummy utility companies in the US, I know I'd pay every penny for a hijacked modem.
Then on top of that, this seems such a small fix. What happens when the new virus out sets it up to call, say, Russia or China. Can't exactly block those countries. Yes yes I didn't RTFA so I'm not sure if these countries have significance more than I know...
I live locally to telus and one of the local television stations reported on this and said that cable modems and ADSL modems where also affected. They failed to mention anything about needing a phone modem connected to a phone line for this to affect the cable and ADSL modems. One way to create more excitement!!
E.g. who in their right mind accepts credit card orders from Romania, Russia or Indonesia when it is well known that the vast majority of those card numbers are stolen?
But I think that what is right now simply a major annoyance to on-line vendors and users (spam, phishing, etc.), will eventually backfire at the countries that are unable (or more likely do not care to) to control Internet fraud of various kind sas they become more and more blacklisted and left out of the Internet economy. This will eventually force their governments to pay attention to the issue. I bet already it is pretty frustrating to be an Internet user in one of such countries and know that most vendors on the internet will not accept any payment from you simply because of your country of origin...
Most of these international telecom LD companies use voip, and the gateway will negotiate to the right codec depending on whether its a data or voice call. Have the carrier detect whether its a voice call or data call and drop on the results.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
I think the idea is that the malware creator owns a 900 number in the countries listed, so he makes a buck from the telco.
Kinda pointless if you're not getting any money.
Hello ? We are talking about phones here, not email spam. Got in the wrong topic ?
A consumer protest broke out about this in Denmark some time ago. The first IP adresses encountered when dialled in were in.....London. The operators charge the long distance call, but your phonecall actually never reaches the country of destination. The blocking described is now standard for all Danish telco's.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Most distros the callout devices are owned by the "console" group, so if the logged-in user were to run such a program, it would dial-out no problem.
Of course the dialler would have to be written for linux and the process would have to be a child of the login process (or local xdm), so no cron jobs.
You should get the boot for that post!
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
amazing. I never thought anything would do that on my toshiba laptop running linux. It was hard enough setting up any kind of dialling on the linmodem, if those scripts would have set up my modem for me and dialed a number, I would have gladly paid for it :)
How many of those monopoly phone companies are government monopolies? "Posts and Telecoms" remains within the government in many places.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I am sad to say that I was caught by one of these auto-dialers about 7 years ago. I was looking for porn (in 8th grade, I think) and saw one of these "free porn" dialers. Anyway, I heard it dial and everything -- but I didn't think it was international. Anyway -- I was stupid and actually stopped looking at porn after maybe 5 minutes, and stayed on the line, browsing, for an hour. The call cost my parents $500. My mom got the bill and immediately called to complain and AT&T said it was a pornographic number, so they nailed me. Anyway, my mom complained to the company that I was just a supid kid, and they waived the fee. So, my mom, who was about to pay this $400 was so happy that she got it waived that she bought me a digital camcorder ($800) for Christmas (which was about a week away). Who said porn never pays?
I think my principles are reachin' an all time low
...with the dialer company (the telco in the foreign country, that is) - otherwise the dialer company would not make any money! The only way that the scam can work is that the foreign telco passes on some of the call revenue to the dialer company. Having said that, in some countries the home telco should also be held responsible - for example, here in Ireland the monopoly telco has specifically put all of the 'dialer countries' into a special band, for which they charge 360c/min, *three times* what they charge for the next band down (122c for 'rest of Pacific Rim'). As such, they make substantially more than the dialer companies themselves out of these scams (which doesn't motivate them to fix the problem.)
I think generally it's not that the phone company is in cahoots with the dialer company, it's just that they don't bother to regulate it or their government hasn't passed laws officially banning the practice.
Implement free highspeed internet for all of your country! Then people can't use the excuse it costs too much!
Gorkman
What about putting code -- in the modem, the OS...somewhere -- that requires the user to verify the call before putting it through? Password it, too, to prevent an automated dialer from doing an end run.
Or, why not just password modem access?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
So people have their computer connected to a telephone line? How quaint!
: )
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
According the to end of this story, British Telecom are going to start doing the same thing too.
for people to not be held accountable. all the dialers i've ever ran across were for porn. and not the good ol american fuckin pron, its usually for something that isn't normally allowed outside of certian countries. But, I am of the mind that if you dont read the eula, you want to see that porn, and you don't realize that there's a shitload of extra numbers in your modem's dial-out, then you should enjoy the $1200 phone bill to rowanda..
This is something that has been going on for a while now. I remember this happening when I was in middle school and when my dad got wind of this trick he kept panicking thinking that I would download some malware. I never had an issue with this and the only one who was likely to do something like this was my mother. She used to want to download that purple monkey thing and it took me a couple months to convince her not to do that anymore and finally I just got sick of having to fight all the stuff she downloaded and reformated her computer. Since then she has not downloaded random things.
A friend of mine lived on a Naval base with his parents and he went to the wrong pr0n sites and got something on his computer that ended up dialing some communist country. So of course the MPs show up at his door the next day wanting to know what buisness they had dialing our "enemies" from a government base. Luckily he just showed them the sweet commie pr0n collection he had acuired and all was forgivin. God bless america.
They accept orders from all 48 states :-)
(or occasionally 50. Tough luck if you are in Pago Pago or Puerto Rico, let alone a foreign country).
>>
Remember last week, when CERT recommended MSIE users consider switching browsers, and MSIE usage fell to under 10%? It didn't happen quite that way, now did it?
CERT publishing a security notice is nowhere near "educating the public".
No one apart from geeks has heard of CERT or sees their notices. Say "CERT" to someone and they'll assume you're talking about an antacid tablet.
It's typical of some people employed by or enamored of a technical specialty to blame the "public" for not being as specialized as they are.
Besides, if someone wants to start educating the public, I'd rather they begin with things like using a turn signal.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Actually I do live in "The Tleus Zone" and they are a great phone company. But I don't like this. Stupid people deserve to be punished for downloading Brity-Spears_CumShot.exe plus it keeps me employed,m no seriously THAT file keeps me employed.
Usually, these scams involve some marginal "billing service" provider. Integretel, eBillit, Payment One, and Verity International are some of the names that come up.
Offer a free international call blocker to all subscribers and allow them to block out all the countries they are reasonably sure they would never call. When you try to call a foreign country that's blocked, a recorded message gives instructions on the procedure for removing the block.
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
Telus is not doing this to protect its customers, it's doing it to protect is own bottom-line. I would imagine that the vast majority of people caught by the modem high jacking scam refuse to pay their bills. They call and complaint, Telus backs down, and it is stuck holding the bag.
This strategy ensures that Telus is never stuck again, plus, it gives them good PR because it appears that it is looking out for its customers. Yeah right.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Telus and SaskTel are doing the same thing. Read at CTV
-- I care not for your foolish signatures.
Funny, I seem to still be able to access port 80 and 21 on my home computer that is connected through telus.
Most spam that appears to originate from Telus is in fact just using forged headers. Try doing some research before jumping to conclusions.
The CERT bulletin he's referring to was published in the Washington Post actually.
Photos.
Maybe I'm just over-simplifiying, but shouldn't telephone customers be able to block dialing out of their country/region by asking their telco? Isn't that a simpler approach to the problem?
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
...what if you have a talking modem? Then you're still screwed.
What is gonna be for those persons from Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Nauru and Sao Tome living in Canada. Is it legal to isolate a person from their native country just because a buch of wackos download every piece of crap off the internet?.
I can imagine people rabbling beacause they can't call to those countries for a major sweepstakes contest going on there.
What about organ donors....
I ran into an individual that paid out for this, several hundred dollars. The problem though, is that he is a dialup user. The other problem is that he only has a single phone-line.
When not in use for the net, the phone-line is disconnected from the modem... since the fax machine or something like that uses it also.
Telus charged him for such a call... but it seems to me that he couldn't have even made it:
-Phoneline likely disconnected
-When connected, phoneline was already dialed out (can't double-dial) -If dialing out, phoneline would interfere with normal fax/calls
Glad to see Telus is doing something about this, but how many people could they have charged, claiming it was the computer's fault, when in fact there was no dialer infection.
There goes my Canadian scam-dialing trojan franchise. Guess I'll have to turn to spam for a living.
--- This
You mean like this? C$69.99! Having worked for RS in the past, I have used this device and you can program it to block specific numbers, long distance numbers, etc.
Ah, that was the reason? If they had come out straight and said so, instead of bullshit WMD claims, I'd have more respect for anything the US & UK governments had to say about it now.
Isn't this effectively making your telephone account a credit account and making your telephone company an unlicensed credit provider without the protections that laws provide?
Roll on free VoIP!
If we assume that 1-million of these messages are sent out every day for an average of $20M, then Nigeria must have a GDP of at least $7.3-quadrillion, which is nearly a thousand times that of the USA. And some people think that globalization is bad for third-world countries.
Dr. Mbingo Mbango Mbongo
Doesn't want to leave the Congo,
Oh no no no no!
No it's a breath mint something most geeks have never heard of.
They did that because of exploits that use those ports. Port 22 is still open.
I doubt they lost more costumers. Many regions serviced by Telus only have Shaw as the competition (or at least main competition). Shaw meters usage. Telus doesn't meter usage. That's my whole reason for being on Telus that I can upload 120GB in a single month and get phoned up asking if I am aware of their new services they are offering--not getting told to limit up my uploading to 1GB. Not to mention that most users do NOT host their own servers.
You also did not need to switch ISPs, but to upgrade to one of their plans that ALLOW server hosting. Commercial accounts didn't block those ports.
Personally I don't like this and would prefer an opt-out policy. Considering all the people who don't know anything and end up downloading executables from Kazaa, I do find it quite a great idea for most users.
That's very stupid. They should go after your friend and people who make money from others. You can bet some poor sucker got paid $50 or less to write the dialer if they even got paid. Once it's made, you have it, just change the number it dials.
It's the telco's and the porn companies that need to be held accountable since they are the ones distributing and profiting from this computer hijacking. They could possibly face jail time for that if they are in the US. Not sure, but it seems there are stricter laws all the time.
Writing a dialer is pathetically easy. Even from a simple DOS prompt, one liner
echo "atdt 1-123-456-7890" > com1:
This is once step BELOW spammers in my opinion, and your using the same pathetic excuses they do. People shouldn't make it so easy to do. Spam at least is only for idiots. Your taking control of computers and waiting until people won't notice.
It's not email software or dialer software that is the problem. It's the scum who take these useful tools and use them to try to rip people off.
Telus blocks other scammers and abusers, but does nothing about its own network of scammers, spammers, and abusers.
t el us.com
http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/listings.lasso?isp=
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
"Telus, a major telco in Canada, decided to block long distance direct-dialed calls to four countries to help reduce dial-up 'modem hijacking'."
Ooh! there were only 4 countries in world. And I had already littered my minds with so many names. Damn it. Thats why i always wondered that names like Canada, or Brazil, or China can never be of countries.
There's much more widerspread modem hijacking associated with many other countries. Just ban all of them then, isn't it. Give people a "busy" errortone when they try to connect, or a "please wait all lines dedicated to an emergency situation" message.
I'm sorry. I don't.
My sister in law was hijacked and called Bell to ask what was going on. The customer service rep told her about the scam and also added that typically this hijacking comes from surfing porn sites. Woops! Looks like her roommate had been using her computer. I wonder how many husbands have been busted over this. :-)
Adventure City Tours
because a program able to install an autodialer is also able to watch your keystrokes and remember your password.
I apologize for posting anonymously, but I'm under non-disclosure on this. I work in the security department of a major long distance provider. Telus's blocks are a good try, but they won't stop the problem. They will put a small dent in it, though.
First of all, it's more than those four countries, although that's about half of the most common ones we've been seeing lately. At the very least, they should have added Diego Garcia, Tuvalu, and Tokelau to the list. But almost every really small, really poor country telco goes in for this kind of thing sooner or later, and at one point so did one of the UK telcos and (oddly enough) so did one of the Canadian telcos.
Do not assume that there has to be a modem on the other side. Your modem doesn't have to sync for you to get charged, it just has to stay dialed into that number long enough for the "first minute" charge to take effect.
The billers keep insisting that everybody who gets billed for these calls has agreed in advance to do so. At least some of them are lying about this. We have seen cases where we're absolutely sure that unlabeled trojans were to blame, including one that sets the user's computer to do so at least once a day for up to a couple of hours when they're not using it.
There are only two completely reliable defenses against this. The only completely reliable was is to never, ever, ever plug an analog phone line into your computer. (I had one customer insist that it couldn't have happened to them, they used broadband. But they had a fax modem card, and the dialer detected and used that.) That's not practical for most people, so instead call your local phone company and ask for a total block on directly dialed international calls. Most companies offer this as a free service. Also make absolutely sure, if you never intend to charge premium services to your phone bill, that you tell this to your local and long distance phone companies; having that note in the records on your account will help their security people know to block the calls more quickly when they get by and may, the first time, help you get the charges removed from your bill.
You can ask your long distance provider to block international directly dialed calls, too, but that'll only help if you get that block from every long distance provider in your country, and in the US that could take you weeks of research because there are so many. But if you're in the US and you don't block every long distance provider, all the dialer authors have to do is preface the modem string with 10-10 and the three-digit carrier code to temporarily switch your long distance provider. That's why it's going to be a lot more reliable if you do it through your local phone company, if they offer the blocking feature you need.
After you've blocked the feature, if you absolutely have to make a directly dialed international call, call your local company and your long distance company, remove the block, wait for it, make the call, and then call them back and restore the block.
US long distance companies aren't blocking whole countries for this because US law won't let them. Telcos are required to deliver every call that you want them to. This means that while we can temporarily stop your service until we can ask you "did you really want to make that call?," we can't pre-emptively stop you from calling poisonous numbers like this because we can't prove that nobody wants to call them. On the contrary, probably about 1 out of ever 20 customers that I speak to about this really did use the dialer on purpose and they intend to pay for the call. (About 3/4 of the callers, though, had it happen because somebody who didn't have their permission to charge long distance calls was sitting at the computer surfing porn or using paid gambling sites without the owner's knowledge. Frequently, it's their kids.)
My employer doesn't want me to tell you this because it is their opinion that every time we reveal anything about what we know about this scam (or any other),
The could just continue allowing customers to amass calls, f*** them over for the bill, and collect.
Most people aren't willing to go to a collection agency over this, so I doubt Telus was being bent over the barrel and losing money (in many cases I've heard the user did pay, which they rightfully should being the one who downloaded idiotic sh*t).
By doing something, it shows that they're aware of the problem, and are willing to do something about it on their end (while not taking actual responsibility for the fact that their users download idiotic sh*t such as phonedialers).
You can still call them, you just have to have the operator help you make the call (or use a phonecard, which is probably cheaper anyhow).
Nobody is cut off. Slightly inconvenienced perhaps, but Telus is even waiving the fees for the operator-assisted call to those countries.
Got a better idea?
still sucks. and is still over priced.
The telco could require that the foreign telco itself require a voice affirmation while connecting the call, agreeing to the charge for the call, in order to connect calls automatically. If disputed, the charging telco could produce the voice affirmation.
--
make install -not war
omfg, this is too mucho... I mean, Sao Tome, come on, Ranma Saotome! I've got to go there some day, just for the hell of it's name.
We are The Atheists. Lower your egos and surrender your beliefs. Resistance is futile.
The governments are a huge part of the problem. In many cases, the "government" is whatever collection of dope dealers, gun runners and paramilitary thugs can gain predominant control over whatever the UN considers to be the government of the country, and this generally includes the post and telecom monopoly, the central bank, and the customs system. It's not that some of them are corrupt, it's that corruption *is* the system.
This will eventually force their governments to pay attention to the issue.
Not really. "The people" are generally just a source of low-end conscripts to be given whatever Enfields are left over from British colonial occupation and thrown at whatever border region is most troublesome this month; they could care less whether they're able to "participate" in the internet economy. Anyone who matters has access to dollar/euro/yen markets overseas, and can buy what they want.
If eventually they make "the world" pissed off enough (ie, European and American central banks ban wire transfers), they'll just hang a couple of wanted "terrorists" out to dry (typically for being behind on their protection payments) for western military interests and use it as leverage to get back in the game.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
You're right. I was thinking of TUMS, something I expect geeks consume in quantity.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Don't download those autodialer programs. I have had the odd one try to install on my machines before, big whoop. Click the Close button and bingo, no modem hijacking and no long distance calls.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Say "CERT" to someone and they'll assume you're talking about an antacid tablet.
;-)
I can't stand the rampant ignorance about common pallatives! Certs are breath mints, not antacids, you ignoramus!
I swear, people just don't even pay attention in the supermarket anymore. When will we have a serious effort to educate people about the proper uses of common products? This is how children end up in the hospital from Tums overdoses....
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
As a backup when the ADSL goes down, (get 4 hours dialup included in my ADSL plan), in my laptop on the road to rural places where there's no broadband/wireless, and also to recieve faxes on the computer from some of my more digitally challenged clients.
Dying...yes, but it's going to be a useful "fallback" for awhile yet.
I use an external serial modem and turn it off when I am not using it. If one of those dialers was on my computer and tried to place a call it would find that the modem was turned off. Years ago, I got into the habit of always turning off my modem when it is not in use.
I have two phone lines at home and the one for modem on is blocked for all long distance calls. That would also stop the phone dialers. It is an option that the telephone company offers. I use an ordinary phone line for my Internet connection because DSL and cable is not available where I live.
I use Linux most of the time on my two home computers and phone dialers and are not a problem with Linux. Linux users almost never have problems with phone dialers, adware, spyware, viruses and worms. Once in a while I do boot it up into Windows. Of course with Windows I regularly scan for spyware using both Ad-Aware and Spybot Search and Destroy. I also keep the virus signatures up to date, the spyware software up to date, use a firewall and install all of the latest security updates for both Windows and Linux. There are also a list of IP addresses that I block in the host file in both Windows and Linux. With all of that I hope that I have bocked most of these kinds of problems!
Canadian are the American not the US of A , we dont invade people costing us billions of USD , killing thousand of our troops and hundreds of thousand of civilians without being firstly under attack. Because one idiot in that country is spitting at the mouth. We are not afraid of anyone , we dont first strike but we win all the wars we enter.
C ourageous
A merican
N oble
A merican
D efender of
A merica
Why would ANYONE still have a modem in their computer anyways? *shudder*
The problem with going after the producers and distributors of the dialer software is that it ends up being whack-a-mole. Any scam artist worth their salt is perfectly capable of shutting down one scam under legal pressure and opening a new one. Going after the telcos is much easier, even if the dialer agents are more culpable.
That's not true. Telus has had long distance competition since 1992 and local competition since 1997.
-- SYS 64738 --
As for the countries in question, I've heard that they are the source of many fraudulent calls. According to my Telus statement from today, they all use North American area codes. A number like 1-592-XXX-XXXX looks more like it's going to London, Ontario than to Guyana. One of my friends called last month, because her modem had been hijacked. Every time she turned on the computer, it called Guyana. She had hundreds of dollars in charges, and could not find the evil applications, despite running Spybot, Adaware, and other programs. (I told her to, um, unplug the modem. And a search of all user profiles on her family's computer revealed the nasty xxxdialer.exe in a family member's files.) She fought hard with Telus, but I'm not sure they ever refunded the charges. I doubt they would -- it all goes back to the content carrier issue.
-- SYS 64738 --
One of the options that our teleco offers is a pin-number based toll-tracking. You get two or more pin numbers for everyone who's going to make toll calls, and a correct pin number has to be dialled before the call will go through. At the end of the month the total for each pin number is listed separately on the bill. Since basically nobody dials long-distance for their internet connection, there's no reason to have a valid pin number anywhere in the computer, so your average porn dialler is going to be SOL (or if they catch on, at least it's going to have to make a LOT of calls before it finds a pin that works.. and the teleco could check for repeat-pin-failures and start reporting them to the customer if it ever became a significant problem.)
But of course your own teleco also makes a profit on these calls, so there's not all that much incentive for them to find a real solution to the problem.
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
KDDI in Japan did this years ago.
>> If Telus operates in a province in Canada, it has
>> a monopoly for the entire province.
That is totally WRONG.
Actually this is pretty funny. We had the same problem here in NZ only instead of blocking the calls totally (Which is a little harsh) we make it so if you call a number in a "suspect" country (of which there are about 10) then you get prompted to hit a random number to continue (i.e sometimes it's 1, sometimes it's 9 etc etc) This allows a real person to proceed while a porn or trojan dialer is thwarted. Well at least until they figure out how to write a voice recognition module for their trojan.
4 32505%3fformat=htmlLink to story
We had a major TV article on this here in NZ just the other day. And yes I work for IHUG.
http://tvnz.co.nz/view/tvone_minisite_story_skin/
Perhaps we are already doing this for spam, but there are many more SMTP servers than telco exchanges.
Perhaps all telco exchanges should run a SPEWSesque system, so they can bloke all these fraudulent telephone scams from all countries.
I would like to see a quick way of combatting fraud, even if it is the uneducated who suffer.
Of course, the solutions of blocking works if you want to send an email to a person, akin to calling them (via an operator) but to stop recieving them (lets talk about telemarketing and spam shall we?) we need a numeric block list, at a small charge, someone can call via an operator, and have their name and intention announced to you, and you can decide to accept the call.
A legitimate caller would do such a thing, and be on your accept list. Telemarketting people wouldn't!
Now can we open up the exchange API's and slot in 3rd party services and give free subscriptions?
Imagine, no spam, no telephone spam, no junk mail, no dialers.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
If you're going to get tricked by this kind of trojan, you're probably aren't going to be the type that's bothered setting up to the optional password system, so for it to be effective it would have to be setup by default on ALL new modems. They would have to bar you from having it automatically "save" the password as well otherwise the trojan would be able to use it rendering it pointless.
Would boycott this product real fast, I do like my linux box being able to connect to the internet by itself without my having to hold its hand...
On the otherhand, what might be useful is to have the modem store a list of password-changeable "authorized numbers". I know I generally only use my modem to dial one ISP number, and occasionally a separate one if I'm overseas, so this could prevent some nasty surprises.
nice ideea indeed. .. speak
international call 1920 - operator please connect me with country xxx number yyy
international call 1990 - dial country xxx number yyy
international call 2004 - operator please connect me with country xxx number yyy
progress works in misterious ways!
and whats more interesting, is that people blame MS for viruses & troians and such ... but for the dialers its not the fault of poor telco service, but the fault of poor countries.
"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Use Linux. Problem solved. Seriously, though, at least use an external modem, so you can turn it off when you disconnect from the internet to prevent any such calls from being made. A problem, named "Dialguard," is good for user verification of phone calls, as you stated in your post.
Many posters seem to think nobody should be using POTS modems now anyway. However, I have several times installed ethernet/POTS interfaces, for these reasons:
1. Sometimes the wideband fails
2. It makes it easy to provide service to multiple machines
3. You don't need to install any software or leave the account info on the hard disk (and all account info is in one place so if you change an ISP you only have to update one place)
4. Some wideband adapters include a POTS port with builtin failover
Such adapters are not supercheap, but how often have you set up a POTS interface this year and had to reconfigure a machine? Or several? What is your time worth?
Educating the public is actually pretty easy. Just lie and tell them the government will be able to snoop around on their insecure browser with their insecure OS and will find out if they are speeding...
sometimes I scare myself with my evil thoughts *sniker*
Sasktel, another major Canadian telco also does this, for the same reasons that Telus does. To me, it seems like a fairly safe way to protect customers while providing minimum hassle to people who actually want to call those countries.
In some countries at least, the dialers are still using the special-rate services within the country. If a local telco is providing the service is can be held to be a direct party to the thing and they can withold fees from illegal activities. Given the misleading dialer consent stuff (and at one stage I fixed someone's computer that was hit by a dialer without any 'click' on license), it is relatively easy to complain to the telco.