Securing the Line Part 6 – Is Phone Spam Nearing?

Everyone is virtually familiar with email spam. It’s constantly generated, attempted to be filtered, and we eventually receive a fraction of it. There is quite an argument surrounding the best filtering and protection procedures and strategies, yet a lot of spam can be stopped before it’s even sent. How? Simply don’t let the would-be “spammer” get a hold of the address in the first place. In parallel, the modern-day worldwide telecommunications network has the same exact issue. Now, “phone spammers” have a much larger, and cheaper, arsenal at their fingertips. Take a mental inventory of how many DIDs or outward-facing phone numbers your organization has. Now, ask yourself how many of those numbers are published or placed on websites. Quite a few, right? There’s nothing worse than flooding a corporate switchboard or administrative assistant’s office with a barrage of phone calls for discount medications. Email spam, even when dropped into the user’s mailbox inadvertently, is still easier to filter. A human can relatively filter messages based on sender and subject alone very quickly and accurately without actually opening the message. Can you filter every phone call based on a falsely-generated Caller ID? Sorry, but if my phone rings with a call from “The Pentagon”, chances are I’ll answer it or my assistant will put it through. Many of you are likely wondering: phone spam isn’t a problem… yet. We need proactive measures now, like CLID authentication and verification techniques, route verification systems to guarantee authenticity of inbound calls, etc. Simply put, this is a problem that will eventually affect us all. However, similar to the email situation that has now become a high-grossing industry, any response to phone spam will likely be reactionary. Let me know what you think! Is this problem something that deserves more attention, now?