Hacked Business Owner Stuck With $52k Phone Bill

ubercam writes "A Canadian business man is on the hook for a $52,000 phone bill after someone hacked into his voice mail system and found a way to dial out. The hacker racked up the charges with calls to Bulgaria. The business owner noticed an odd message coming up on his call display (Feature 36), and alerted his provider, Manitoba Telecom Services. They referred him to their fraud department, who discovered the breach. MTS said that they would reverse the charges if the hacked equipment was theirs, but in this case it was customer owned. The ironic part is that the victim's company, HUB Computer Solutions, is in the business of computer and network security. They even offer to sell, configure and secure Cisco VoIP systems. Looks as though they even couldn't manage to secure their own system, which doesn't bode well for their customers." This certainly isn't the first time someone has exploited the phone system and stuck another with the bill. Maybe it's time for the phone company to get their fraud detection and prevention services at least on par with the credit card companies'.

Comments

Not astonishingly suprising...

[damn_registrars]

I don't find this suprising in perspective of what people in the service sector usually have for themselves.

After all, what kind of car does your mechanic drive? Do you know when your mechanic last did an oil change on their own car?

Hint - the mechanic's car is usually fixed last, if ever.

In similar light I knew a cardiologist a few years back who died of heart failure.

It isn't easy to find time to maintain for yourself the same kind of equipment that you are paid to keep up for others.

Re:Not astonishingly suprising...

[Spazztastic]

Or the old quote. The Carpenters house is always the one that is in least repair.

Good point, their site runs Sharepoint and the Site Settings prompt is open to the world.

http://www.hub.ca/default.aspx

Good luck with MTS. Seriously.

[Abstrackt]

I had a phone cable dug up recently because MTS didn't mark it on a cable locate. The responses ranged from "sorry, you're out of luck" to "where else are you going to go for phone service?" I feel bad for the guy, but unless he takes it to court he isn't getting any help from MTS.

Re:ScuttleMonkey doesn't even read TFS

[morgan_greywolf]

ScuttleMonkey probably just hasn't figured out that, as far as the telcos are concerned, everything on the INSIDE of the drop is the customer's problem, everything on the OUTSIDE of the drop is the phone company's problem, unless the customer has specifically hired the phone company to handle the customer premises equipment. And more and more phone companies aren't doing that anymore.

Re:bewildering...

[snspdaarf]

Agreed. When our receptionist got hacked, and was doing call transfers to "9", AT&T picked up on the outbound calls as unusual and called us. They shut down the calls and canceled the charges. We own our switch, and there was none of this silly dance that MTS is doing.

Re:1-900...

[gandhi_2]

I just spent 2 weeks in Bulgaria with the Utah Army National Guard.

Let me assure you, none of us had ever seen so many gorgeous women in one place.

Re:WTF?

[mewsenews]

Some context from a native of Winnipeg:

MTS is our AT&T, it's the big bad phone company. I believe it's the second largest company in our province, behind the power company. HUB is a tiny business that I had never heard of. This is very much a David vs. Goliath thing, the HUB guy wants MTS to go easy on the bill because they have money. MTS has dropped all responsibility because it's not their equipment that was hacked, but this guy has come back with "you should have notified me earlier of abnormal usage on my phone lines".

The HUB guy will have to lay off one of his staff unless MTS goes easy on this bill. His only method of leverage on MTS is to speak to the newspaper. That's the reason he's risking public embarrassment.

Re:WTF?

[jlarocco]

I think your jumping to conclusions - the article doesn't give enough information to say whether it should be embarrassing or not. Clearly if he setup the system himself using Asterisk or something, and setting up PBX systems is a service he sells, it's pretty embarrassing. The article doesn't say that, though.

He could have bought the PBX system from a third party, and had them set it up. But the article doesn't say he did that, either. In that case he should probably sue that company for not securing their product.

All the article says is that he wasn't renting the equipment from the phone company.

Re:The phone company?

[Ironica]

Why should the phone company be responsible for their customer's incompetence?

If they installed it... maybe... but they didn't.

Why are credit card companies responsible for their customers' incompetence? If I leave my credit card on a bench at the mall, and call to report it lost within a reasonable amount of time, I'm not liable for most of the charges. That's a legal limitation, too... not just customer service. The credit card company didn't leave my card lying around, or make it easier to lose in some way, but they still have to eat the charges.

Several years ago, our electric bill jumped suddenly. Our deadbeat tweaker roommate decided to run the AC 24/7 "Like they do in Hawaii." The (municipal) power department computers automatically detected the change in usage, flagged it, stopped our bill from being issued, and sent it to CS to contact us and find out if there was a physical problem. (Then something got dropped so they didn't contact us, and didn't send a bill... four months later they came knocking on our door, all apologies.)

So, yeah, I think it's reasonable for a utility company to auto-flag aberrant usage. Though true, the guy *should* have configured his phone system correctly too...