I have been recently seeing a trend with the growing popularity of Asterisk and IP telephony: spamming.
Remember how spammers would search for open SMTP relay servers to send spam? Well a similar trend is happening with VoIP. Lately, I’ve been watching spammers scan for open SIP servers, looking for an open proxy servers, or insecure SIP accounts, which they can exploit in order to send unsolicited phone calls. The spammers then use the vulnerable server to send “telephone spam” to your POTS phone. With the growing popularity of VoIP servers like Asterisk this is going to become a bigger and bigger problem.
What is going to happen when our phone service becomes more and more connected to the Internet? Will we see an increase of “phone spam,” or phone scams? With traditional phone service we still had telemarketers, scammers, and the like, but at least it was easier to track them down or get on a do not call list. However, when VoIP is added to the equation, now it because easier to disguise yourself by using proxies and exploiting vulnerable servers.
This new technology is fun, don’t get my wrong. But I do hope the VoIP and telecommunications community does realize they have a problem on their hands. It may not be that much of a problem now, but it’s going to be a big one down the road.
Opening up the phone network opens the door to junk, just like when Facebook opened it’s platform to third party applications.
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