Thanks to increased awareness about scam calls, fewer people answer their phones when they see an unknown caller ID. But what happens if a bad actor bypasses telecom companies and uses a professional communication platform like Teams and Slack to make scam phone or even video calls?
While some research finds telecommunication companies have more work to do in preventing traditional scam calls, experts like Josh Bercu—the VP for policy and advocacy at USTelecom and the executive director of Industry Traceback Group—said that telecommunication companies in the US have the IT know-how to identify bad actors and notify law enforcement.
“Carriers today, they block and label calls, they have analytics running,” Bercu told IT Brew. “They have a lot of that. We do have what’s across the network, something called the STIR/SHAKEN authentication framework, it’s been implemented—that is intended to address spoof calls.”
Sean Gallagher, a security researcher engineer at Cisco Talos, said spoofed phone calls—when a caller knowingly falsifies the information put into a caller ID display to hide their identity—have become more targeted and harder to detect because of video-calling platforms.
“A lot of what the telecom is doing is very important work to block traditional phone connections from doing this sort of thing and by identifying numbers as spam risks, for example, those are very important,” Gallagher said. “We’re bypassing the entire telecommunications chain with things like Teams [voice phishing]…Those don’t come in on normal phone lines, they do not get stopped by anything the telecommunications industry is doing.”
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Video killed the phone calls. In recent years, users have received warnings from companies like Microsoft and Slack about spam calls, complete with instructions about how to filter inbound calls from potential bad actors.
Gallagher said that attackers are now taking advantage of weak configurations in many companies’ communication setups.
For example, Teams’s default settings allow users to receive calls from other organizations through the platform, offering an opportunity for someone to use this technology to bypass any screening protocols a telecom company has in place.
Gallagher said that he has seen fraud move away from voice calls and move to internet services. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), which allows someone to make a call using broadband internet connection instead of a phone line, is just one example of a technology that allows scammers to sidestep telecom companies and land on your screen.
“You can put a [VoIP] server anywhere in the world and connect it over to the internet, and you can spoof caller IDs and things like that very easily with [VoIP],” Gallagher said. “Unless [a VoIP] provider or a specific network has been identified as a threat previously, spam risk is not going to help the person on the other end.”