Phone hacking, or phreaking as it is known, is more widespead than we could ever imagine.
The most common way in which a business is “phreaked” is via their voicemail system, a good tip to remember here is to change passwords regulary, and as an absolute bare minimum CHANGE THE DEFAULT PASSWORD IMMEDIATELY, if you don’t it could be a very expensive business.
Phreaking is more costly than credit card fraud to the UK, yet we hardly ever hear of it. The businesses I’ve heard of that have been subject to an attack often claim that when reporting to the police, the police often do not know how to deal with the situation and often advise not to pay the bill. This advice is wrong, unfortunately, at the end of the day you have to pay the network company, why should they be out of pocket for your errors? We all have a responsibility to ensure that our office equipment is secure from all sorts of attack, after all you pay for virus protection to prevent an attack on your computer system, you pay for firewall to prevent hacking to your computer system, it there for begs the question why we fail to protect our telephone systems.
From the last recorded data available, 2009, PHREAKING via voicemail cost $22 billion globally, total telephone fraud that year was estimated to be between $75-80 billion.
In the UK, from the same year, a survey on VOIP hacking cost UK Business £1.2 billion.
The following is taken from the BBC News website from Feb 2012
Hacking network Anonymous has released a recording of a conference call between the FBI and UK police in which they discuss efforts against hackers.
The call, said to have taken place last month, covers the tracking of Anonymous and similar groups, dates of planned arrests and details of evidence held.
To try and sum up : Phreaking is controlled by organised crime and big business which funds international terrorism – and they could cost you a fortune in telephone calls you didn’t make but your telco will demand you pay because they were made from your exchange lines and extensions via your phone system
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