Exploring fraud in telephony networks
Telephone networks form the oldest large scale network that has grown to
touch over 7 billion people. Telephony is now merging many complex
technologies (PSTN, cellular and IP networks) and enabling numerous
services that can be easily monetized. However, security challenges for
telephony are often neither well understood, nor well addressed. As a
result, telephone networks attract a lot of fraud. In this talk, we will
systematically explore the fraud in telephone networks, focusing on
voice telephony. We will present a taxonomy of fraud, and analyze two
prevalent fraud schemes in more detail: looking into the ecosystem of
International Revenue Share Fraud (IRSF), and discussing a new
countermeasure to the well-known problem of voice spam.