Net Phone Customers Brace For 'VoIP Spam'

XaviorPenguin writes "If you think that Spam in your e-mail inbox is bad, wait until VoIP gets huge! According to a News.CNet.com story, your voice mail box on your Net Phones may be cluttered with ads for Viagra. '"The fear with VoIP spam is you will have an Internet address for your phone number, which means you can use the same tools you use for e-mail to generate traffic," said Tom Kershaw, a vice president at security specialist VeriSign. "That raises automation to scary degrees."' If you think that is scary, you know the Do-Not-Call list that is out by the FTC, yeah, um, people with Net Phones may not be affected by this list and spammers/telemarketers may take this advantage for themselves. "

Comments

Er,

[hexag]

What, this is suprising? People using new communications methods to advetise to the public? What on Earth is the world coming to.

Oh well, I'll still with my text spamed mobile. And those phonecalls I get, asking me to upgrade my phone. Oh.

Same options for both parties

[Sascha J.]

Well, same possibilities for spamming, means same possibilities for Spamfilters. I know, it's only a cold comfort ;).

Re:Same options for both parties

[FluxInductor]

In theory, yes. But filtering is difficult enough when the entire message is written in text - that means all the information is blatantly there in zeros and ones. Voice recognition adds a whole new dimension to the problem... They'll change the recording every day or so using a different voice, can we keep up?

The FCC cannot regulate the world.

[tpgp]

If you think that is scary, you know the Do-Not-Call list that is out by the FTC

The FCC cannot regulate the entire world - just the US.

Spammers can operate from other countries without worrying about FCC's do-not-call lists (or using compromised boxes for that matter).

News.com and VoIP = FUD

[darkfus]

If you look at CNET's coverage of VoIP on their web site, you'll notice a major trend: FUD.

With that in mind, I take this with a grain of salt. I have Vonage and I disabled my voicemail the first day I got it. Why? I own an answering machine which my wife is somewhat attached to and to be honest, so am I.

If you don't like a function, just turn it off!

df

do not call list

[FluxInductor]

I don't understand why the "do not call list" does not apply to this technology. Can anyone explain, please? I mean, from a legal pov.

Re:do not call list

[Anders Andersson]

The Do Not Call list only applies to phone numbers.

But not to IP addresses, e-mail addresses, amateur radio callsigns, snail mail addresses, social security numbers, credit card numbers, passport numbers...

The Do Not Call list law really should be changed to fix this loophole.

Loophole? How? The list covers exactly one kind of number (the phone number); you hope to add one more (the IP address) and claim this modest change to amount to "closing" a loophole. What about all the other kinds of numbers or addresses, either used for communication today or potentially tomorrow?

The law is designed specifically for telephone numbers. Let's say it were instead designed to deal with individuals wanting to avoid advertising using any communication channel, be it POTS, VoIP, radio, fax or whatever. Would you submit all your contact info to a Do Not Contact list for the marketers to do the screening?

"I have submitted my cable TV subscriber number to the Do Not Contact list, but I still receive commercial broadcasts over the cable; now where do I file a complaint?"

When you want to plug the hole around your umbrella that is called the "sky" for letting in rain sideways, it's time to go underground.

Re:Back door...

[Heem]

so put it behind your firewall and only accept incoming from your provider.

Please deposit .50 escrow to complete your call

[G4from128k]

The near zero cost of communication is the root cause of spam (and the reason the net is the best of places and worst of places). Until the recipient, who bears the high labor cost of coping with spam, can levy a charge on the sender, who bears near zero cost for mass-produced messages, spam will persist and proliferate.

The past is a poor crystal ball

[Anders Andersson]

Well so far Vonage is great.

Compared to what other providers of similar services?

Ive been a subscriber for 3 years and have not recived a single sales call.

When I started receiving junk e-mail around 1995, I had been using e-mail for some ten years already. My great experience of a spam-free past did absolutely nothing to reduce the amount of junk I received later; it rather became more annoying to me in comparison.

Note that the article warns about future rather than past or present advertising. Your experience may be comforting to you, but it doesn't sound very relevant.

Sounds like security specialists spreading FUD

[pandrijeczko]

Having read the article, I'm amazed that one very important fact has been almost completely overlooked - namely that every call will have a charge associated to it.

If the VoIP world goes the way of SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) then everyone will need to use a service provider to assist in routing calls outside of a business network. That provider will assign a charge, albeit a small one, to each call. Unlike sending spam email virtually free of charge, making 100,000 VoIP spam calls will cost a tidy sum of money - far beyond the purses of any 2-bit spammer!

Secondly, in a SIP environment, any call needs to go via a SIP registration server so that the caller is able to get information on what devices and messaging services the called party has available as well as obtaining the called party's IP address (remembering of course that if the called party is mobile, the IP address he or she is registered to is rapidly changing anyway!) I have no doubt that it's a relatively simple task to provide some connection blocking at the SIP server so that it's possible to create a blacklist of callers that will never get a connection.

Sure, I've no doubt that telemarketers will make use of VoIP but while both telemarketers and spammers should burn in hell, telemarketers target specific individuals (based on information they have on that individual that makes them believe they can sell something to him or her) and therefore generate far less junk traffic than spammers.

Personally, this is just FUD spread by a bunch of "think-they-know-it-all" security cowboys out to make a fast buck.

Re:Back door...

[David_W]

so put it behind your firewall and only accept incoming from your provider.

OK, I know virtually nothing about VoIP, but I'm betting I'm right here... wouldn't that also block legitimate calls from others using VoIP phones? (I would think almost certainly for calls from other VoIP providers, unless they route out through POTS, and very possibly other calls from people using your provider as I'd imagine they would route those calls directly to save on costs.)

Re:sigh...

[nmb3000]

Most phone telemarketers were operating legal businesses, so when laws made it imposible for them to operate they simply went out of business.

It's just too durn bad too. I'm sure so many of us were heartbroken to see them go. Just because they were legitimate doesn't mean they weren't a pain in the ass.

You make a very valid point, but whatever the reason, I'm glad to see them gone, even though they did occasionally provide some entertainment when I was in a particularily sadistic mood.

Dinner...

[Ravensign]

At least an inbox full of VM's doesnt interrupt your dinner, or make you come running in from mowing the lawn to be told your windows could be more energy efficient.

OTOH, Unsolicited anything is the suck. Hey Seller-of-Things, guess what, I have PLENTY of ways to get in touch with you if I want something. Thanks.

Re:anonymous calls?

[ad0gg]

Not sure about regular calls but for voice mails, since an ivr type service is picking up, it could easily prompt the person to type in a combination of numbers to leave a message something a broadcast program can't easily figure out.

Spam is like Graffitti

[Simonetta]

Spam is in the same class of social irritants as grafitti. (il mio Italiano no esta bonno).

It is someone hijacking a lightly guarded public place for their own benefit. The physical area that gets defaced by grafitti is too low in value to hire a full-time guard to prevent its defacement. The shitperson can deface the area quickly with paint and not get caught, providing a free advertising medium for himself and his (always a male) message.
Public law enforcement officers say that the faster an area that has been defaced by grafitti is cleared of the defacement, the less likely it is to be re-vandalized. I'm not sure if this applies to spam as well. However I do believe that spam in the same social catagory as grafitti.
Spammers, like grafitti vandals, are assholes. To accept as legitimate advertisers is only to ask to deluged with endless amounts of worthless spam. The legal arguments that are used against vandals should be refined and tested in court against spammers.
And, yes, grafitti vandals are assholes too. They aren't artists. They have the ability to create art but they don't. They foul public places. People who claim that grafitti vandals are artists are assholes too. So are the people who defend spammers as 'new media' advertisers.

Re:Spam is like Graffitti

[Scratch-O-Matic]

However I do believe that spam in the same social catagory as grafitti.

I think spam is more like 200 neighbors letting their dogs shit in your yard each day.

Or, to keep with your grafitti motif, spam is like an endless stream of grafitti painted on your own garage door.

I'm not disagreeing with your interesting post...just adding my 2c.

Re:Spam is like Graffitti

[drinkypoo]

I am an asshole. I don't graffiti, but I think graffiti is art, provided that it's only put on public property, and that it's more than just a tag sprayed out in a single line.

What really offends me is when I see someone tag right over some really nice graffiti.

Re:Spam is like Graffitti

[An Onerous Coward]

By the very definition of "public property," the graffiti "artist" has no more right to use the property being decorated than I do. If something belongs to everyone, then anyone who uses the property in a way that devalues the enjoyment of the property for others is committing an unethical act.

Graffiti can be art, in much the same way that the Mona Lisa would have been an artistic tour de force had she been tastefully tatooed onto the back of an unwilling peasant woman instead of put on canvas. Whatever merits of form, color, or composition a piece of graffiti may have, it has no bearing on the fact that the artist had no right to put it there.

Re:Spam is like Graffitti

[NeoSkandranon]

Vandalism is vandalism, regardless if its on public or private property...

Re:Spam is like Graffitti

[LibrePensador]

Let me state that while not all graffiti is equally defensible, I think of it as a valuable form of expression. And the problem is that as with many other free speech issues, you cannot protect the positive uses while penalizing the negative ones. Hear me out, before you jump the gun.

See, there are times when the appropriation of public space is the only way to speak because the state controls all legal forms of communication. This isn't as true in the United States, although the large media conglomerates do exercise a great deal of control over what he hear and listen. Thankfully, we have the internet still left.

Yet, as surprising as that may be to some Slashdotters, a piece of wall is an easiser medium to master than a computer and thinking otherwise only shows how out of touch some of you may be with some very poor communities in the United States where internet access does not exist nor do the skills to use a computer are common (I am working on fixing both, by the way).

Moreover, graffiti and leafletting have both played a crucial roal in breaking the fear that grips societies in authoritarian regimes. In dictatorships where people often die for less than painting graffiti on the wall, a piece of political graffiti can serve to end the sense of isolation caused by fear that often renders people unable to seek other ways to overthrow the military junta.

If you are interested in history, read about how graffiti was used against the dictatorships of the southern cone in Latin America in the late 1970s and 1980s.

The ethymological origin of the word is also very telling:

Graffiti Graf*fi"ti, n. pl. It., pl. of graffito scratched Inscriptions, figure drawings, etc., found on the walls of ancient sepulchers or ruins, as in the Catacombs, or at Pompeii.

Re:Doesn't sound all that bad...

[avdp]

They don't, and people like ourself with Vonage-like services that interfaces with POTS are most definetely covered by the Do Not Call list. As far as them spamming my little VoIP box from Cisco - well, I may be a bit naive but I hope that it will only accept calls from my provider. If that feature isn't in already, I am sure it will be added days after voip spam starts.

Re:anonymous calls?

[lysander]

Gee, I wonder who might want to provide me with... oh, I don't know... some sort of authentication for VoIP... or perhaps internet services in general...

"The fear with VoIP spam is you will have an Internet address for your phone number, which means you can use the same tools you use for e-mail to generate traffic, said Tom Kershaw, a vice president at security specialist VeriSign.

Re:Back door...

[silas_moeckel]

Yes and no. Most of your VoIP users are behind firewalls. Vonage at least does not route calls directly because simple NAT breaks SIP so they realy cant. As things progress and more people register to different gateways and fix incomming SIP connections it may get worse.

Spam filters for voip calls... *sigh*

[digital photo]

Well this is interesting.

Looks like it's time for homes to have small computers which runs a small voip routing server to handle calls of various natures:

• A list of known numbers we trust.
• Unlisted numbers to be dumped into a seperate bin
• Voice to text scanning to determine content
• Voice print scanning for known callers

Sounds like an open source project to me.

Also a great way to gather the numbers of known spammers and distribute a list of said numbers/ip addresses for blocking.

The phone companies, as noted in the artcle, thinking that it isn't a big deal is basically shrugging responsibility for something which they should take more seriously. Given the nature of phone spam, email spam, and phone sms/messaging spam, to think that voip spam is a low priority target is pretty slipshod.

*shrugs* Looks like voip filtering will just be an extension to the massive spam filtering already being done. Wish I could send a bill to the spammers for the extra work they are basically forcing me to do. :(