Vodafone Compromised?

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vulcannz

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#77925 24-Feb-2011 13:58

A bunch of us have been receiving spam / phishing calls from offshore.

2 of the phones I own have 'not listed' numbers, ie not found online or in peoples phone books - one is a SIM in a Huawei S7 tablet not used for calls but capabile of calls.

Have Vodafone NZ been compromised? It seems odd to me to be getting calls on these numbers.

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#443047 24-Feb-2011 14:02

My wife and I have both received similar texts on vodafone as well.

johnr

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#443066 24-Feb-2011 15:05

These off Shore scammers just do it by number ranges these are not hard to find online and they just hope for the best.

Saying Vodafone has been compromised because some scammer calls or sends a SMS to a mobile number is just too far fetched

http://www.nad.org.nz/ has the number ranges on it

John

wellygary

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#443077 24-Feb-2011 15:20

As above, they will just be scatter-gunning a range of numbers,

vulcannz

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#443135 24-Feb-2011 17:50

rubbish, there's a difference between dialers and hitting a large range of disparate numbers within a short time frame. There is approximate 10 million variations between the lowest number and highest number I know of that were spammed today. Do some math, if a dialer can make 4 calls a minute before it decides they're not there or not (which I think is generous, as they tried my number 8 times before they gave up) then thats 240 calls an hour, 5760 calls a day.

To scan through the range top to bottom they'd have to have 2000 dialers going at it and thats if I gave them a full day, when the time frame between several numbers was less than half a day.

johnr

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#443136 24-Feb-2011 17:53

Rubbish where?

Do you honestly think hackers would Compromise a network just to get a bunch of mobile numbers to ring people.............come on smell the roses

John

Ragnor

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#443143 24-Feb-2011 18:30

Yes of course a spammer, if they had access to a list/db of active numbers they would use it to spam...

However, if spammers did have such a DB you'd probably see a heck of lot more people complaining about receiving spam right now.

This one sounds like an isolated incident to me.

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sbiddle

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#443166 24-Feb-2011 20:22

Ragnor: Yes of course a spammer, if they had access to a list/db of active numbers they would use it to spam...

However, if spammers did have such a DB you'd probably see a heck of lot more people complaining about receiving spam right now.

This one sounds like an isolated incident to me.

It's far from isolated, there have probably been at probably a dozen or so foreign originated SMS scams that have hit NZ in the past year that I'm aware of, a number of which have been discussed on here.

cisconz

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#443173 24-Feb-2011 20:40

vulcannz: rubbish, there's a difference between dialers and hitting a large range of disparate numbers within a short time frame. There is approximate 10 million variations between the lowest number and highest number I know of that were spammed today. Do some math, if a dialer can make 4 calls a minute before it decides they're not there or not (which I think is generous, as they tried my number 8 times before they gave up) then thats 240 calls an hour, 5760 calls a day.

To scan through the range top to bottom they'd have to have 2000 dialers going at it and thats if I gave them a full day, when the time frame between several numbers was less than half a day.

Ye of little faith.

A client of mine sends 20,000 calls a day to Australia though a 90 line dialler.

That is one call centre, they have 5.

Hmmmm

vulcannz

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#443177 24-Feb-2011 21:00

cisconz:
vulcannz: rubbish, there's a difference between dialers and hitting a large range of disparate numbers within a short time frame. There is approximate 10 million variations between the lowest number and highest number I know of that were spammed today. Do some math, if a dialer can make 4 calls a minute before it decides they're not there or not (which I think is generous, as they tried my number 8 times before they gave up) then thats 240 calls an hour, 5760 calls a day.

To scan through the range top to bottom they'd have to have 2000 dialers going at it and thats if I gave them a full day, when the time frame between several numbers was less than half a day.

Ye of little faith.

A client of mine sends 20,000 calls a day to Australia though a 90 line dialler.

That is one call centre, they have 5.

Ye of little maths skills. That represents .2% of the potential numbers they'd have to get through, your own example would extrapolate to require ~45000 dialers.

cisconz

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#443181 24-Feb-2011 21:13

vulcannz:
cisconz:
vulcannz: rubbish, there's a difference between dialers and hitting a large range of disparate numbers within a short time frame. There is approximate 10 million variations between the lowest number and highest number I know of that were spammed today. Do some math, if a dialer can make 4 calls a minute before it decides they're not there or not (which I think is generous, as they tried my number 8 times before they gave up) then thats 240 calls an hour, 5760 calls a day.

To scan through the range top to bottom they'd have to have 2000 dialers going at it and thats if I gave them a full day, when the time frame between several numbers was less than half a day.

Ye of little faith.

A client of mine sends 20,000 calls a day to Australia though a 90 line dialler.

That is one call centre, they have 5.

Ye of little maths skills. That represents .2% of the potential numbers they'd have to get through, your own example would extrapolate to require ~45000 dialers.

This is representing 1 company. There are a lot more than this.
anyway they buy lists of numbers, these lists do not dial 0210000001 then 0210000002 etc, also it taks about 1 second to find a disconnected number.

Hmmmm

vulcannz

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#443183 24-Feb-2011 21:19

cisconz:
vulcannz:
cisconz:
vulcannz: rubbish, there's a difference between dialers and hitting a large range of disparate numbers within a short time frame. There is approximate 10 million variations between the lowest number and highest number I know of that were spammed today. Do some math, if a dialer can make 4 calls a minute before it decides they're not there or not (which I think is generous, as they tried my number 8 times before they gave up) then thats 240 calls an hour, 5760 calls a day.

To scan through the range top to bottom they'd have to have 2000 dialers going at it and thats if I gave them a full day, when the time frame between several numbers was less than half a day.

Ye of little faith.

A client of mine sends 20,000 calls a day to Australia though a 90 line dialler.

That is one call centre, they have 5.

Ye of little maths skills. That represents .2% of the potential numbers they'd have to get through, your own example would extrapolate to require ~45000 dialers.

This is representing 1 company. There are a lot more than this.
anyway they buy lists of numbers, these lists do not dial 0210000001 then 0210000002 etc, also it taks about 1 second to find a disconnected number.

Read the original post. At least 2 of the numbers are unpublished. The only way to get them is through bulk sequential dialing, or from Vodafone.

This is also one phisher, the "you won lotto" crowd. Or are you implying thousands of phishing operations popped up all at the same time, use the same number to mask their call, and co-incidentally decided to call vodafone NZ numbers?

It takes more than 1 second, especially with mobile as it does not direct to a disconnected tone like a land line.

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sbiddle

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#443184 24-Feb-2011 21:26

vulcannz:It takes more than 1 second, especially with mobile as it does not direct to a disconnected tone like a land line.

Depends entirely on the interconnect and access to signalling.

cisconz

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#443185 24-Feb-2011 21:27

vulcannz: Read the original post. At least 2 of the numbers are unpublished. The only way to get them is through bulk sequential dialing, or from Vodafone.

This is also one phisher, the "you won lotto" crowd. Or are you implying thousands of phishing operations popped up all at the same time, use the same number to mask their call, and co-incidentally decided to call vodafone NZ numbers?

It takes more than 1 second, especially with mobile as it does not direct to a disconnected tone like a land line.

It doesn't matter if the number is published or not, if you use the number then it can receive spam calls.

Do some research on ISDN or SS7 error codes, these are used to tell if the number is connected. It is highly unlikely that audio messages or disconnection tones are used.

Hmmmm

vulcannz

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#443263 25-Feb-2011 08:01

cisconz:
vulcannz: Read the original post. At least 2 of the numbers are unpublished. The only way to get them is through bulk sequential dialing, or from Vodafone.

This is also one phisher, the "you won lotto" crowd. Or are you implying thousands of phishing operations popped up all at the same time, use the same number to mask their call, and co-incidentally decided to call vodafone NZ numbers?

It takes more than 1 second, especially with mobile as it does not direct to a disconnected tone like a land line.

It doesn't matter if the number is published or not, if you use the number then it can receive spam calls.

Do some research on ISDN or SS7 error codes, these are used to tell if the number is connected. It is highly unlikely that audio messages or disconnection tones are used.

It does matter if a number is published, the issue as to whether it can receive calls or not is totally irrelevant. The relevance is who had access to that number (ie was it in compromised users contacts/phone books). The number was used in a tablet for data, it was not given out as a contact number.

We have an office of mixed telecom and vodafone numbers, all the vodafone numbers were hit in a very short period which is unusual for phisers/spammers. Telecom numbers have not been touched.

This is also an illegal operation, likely to be run sharp and short, not with a complex investment in equipment or a lot of people.

NzBeagle

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#443266 25-Feb-2011 08:34

vulcannz: This is also an illegal operation, likely to be run sharp and short, not with a complex investment in equipment or a lot of people.

I'd say the opposite, these kinds of operations probably get a lot of investment, it's big business overseas, and if they can convince some people to hand over cash, which is well known to happen, then they will get a return. It would also be a pretty cheap operation to run out of many countries.

It's amazing where you can collect numbers, when I merged contacts from a few different accounts, Twitter, Facebook, Hotmail and Gmail, I ended up with a whole lot of numbers for people i'd never used. Plenty of different ways for people to get numbers, it'd be pretty hard to pinpoint VF as the source, unless they came out and said so themselves, unlikely.

Downside, or upside depending who you ask, to a connected world, is that no matter how hard you try, more of your details will become public.

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