Who's behind your network? [VoIP fraud

Abstract

Fraud, the art of earning money through the unauthorised, and often unlawful, use of a system, is well known in the circuit switched telephony business. Traditional telcos have invested heavily in detecting and preventing fraud, and they have largely been successful. At present, in the nascent era of voice over Internet telephony (or VoIP), many carriers are relearning old lessons. A cousin of fraud is abuse, where the art form is to use a system in a manner for which it was not intended, but perhaps not as overtly illegal. Using your local Internet connection to create a paid-for VoIP hosting or termination service, while not illegal, certainly violates the carrier's original intention of providing Internet access for a single user. With both fraud and abuse, knowledge of use - i.e., being able to 'see' the traffic at all levels, from network to application - is the key to managing services. IP carriers need to have the ability to see the multidimensional aspects of what is happening on their networks. This knowledge allows them to detect fraud and abuse, and correlate the events necessary for a. proper investigation. Telcos must either start monitoring how their services are being used or face being robbed by some of their own customers.