M3AAWG Tackles Robocalls and Other Telephony Threats With Industry-Wide Workshop and New Anti-Abuse SIG
January 14 2014 - 11:30AM
Marketwired
M3AAWG Tackles Robocalls and Other Telephony Threats With
Industry-Wide Workshop and New Anti-Abuse SIG
SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Jan 14, 2014) - With
"robocalls" increasing fifty percent in one year and Voice over IP
services routinely commandeered in attacks that overload and extort
money from critical public safety switchboards, the Messaging,
Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group is initiating a
two-step, global effort to protect telephony services from criminal
activity and abuse. A February workshop open to the industry,
government and academia will focus on identifying key threats and
actions to help reduce telephone services exploitation and a new
M3AAWG special interest group will tackle the ongoing work of
developing best practices, technologies and methods for mitigating
phone-based attacks.
Telephony abuse has recently expanded beyond annoying automated
telemarketing robocalls and today has become a public safety issue
as it disrupts text, voice, video call, and messaging
services. Consequently, the Voice and Telephony Anti-Abuse
Workshop and the new M3AAWG VTA SIG are open to all services
connected to the global public telecommunications network that use
telephone numbers as a primary endpoint address.
According to complaints logged by the U.S. Federal Trade
Commission, robocalls increased more than fifty percent in fiscal
2012, just in the United States. Other, more serious,
telephony exploits are endangering public safety; for example,
there are "swatting" extortion schemes where criminals use
Telephone Denial of Service (TDoS) assaults to swamp fire, hospital
or police call centers and prevent legitimate emergency calls from
getting through. The assailants then demand a ransom payment to end
the onslaught.
"Telephony is quickly becoming another Internet medium for
cybercriminals to exploit as media-agile attackers integrate
robodialing, text messaging, email, voice response, boiler room and
Web attack vectors. Internet and telephony technology are
converging, and inexpensive VoIP services are providing the
accessibility and anonymity for national and transnational
attacks. The Voice and Telephony Abuse SIG will tap into the
proven collaborative methodologies and the expertise at M3AAWG that
has successfully curtailed spam and malware as we focus on
mitigating the increasing abuse we're seeing with the convergence
of the Internet and telephony," said Alex Bobotek, M3AAWG
Co-Chairman.
Vetted Attendance at Workshop and SIG
Both the workshop and SIG kickoff are being held in conjunction
with the M3AAWG 30th General Meeting, which is February 17-20 in
San Francisco. The February 20-21 workshop, hosted by the new
VTA SIG, is open to approved telephone companies and mobile
operators, ISPs, law enforcement, security vendors, academia,
government and public policy officials, and other industry
personnel interested in fighting telephony abuse. The initial VTA
SIG kickoff working session is scheduled during the general M3AAWG
meeting.
The SIG will leverage the organization's decade-long experience
in bringing together divergent industry partners in a vetted
environment to develop collaborative practices that protect
networks and end-users. It is being led by SIG co-chairs
Bobotek and Mustaque Ahamad, professor at Georgia Tech's College of
Computing.
Industry professionals who are not M3AAWG members can find more
information and request an invitation to the vetted Voice and
Telephony Anti-Abuse Workshop at http://bit.ly/1fkskaI. M3AAWG
members can request to attend the workshop on the meeting
registration page accessible with login at www.m3aawg.org.
The four-day M3AAWG 30th General Meeting will offer three tracks
and 40 sessions featuring presentations by leading experts on
malware detection, DDoS attack prevention, mobile security, public
policy issues, anti-abuse work in developing countries and other
topics. The M3AAWG Hosting SIG and M3AAWG Identity Management SIG
have organized working sessions to continue developing important
industry best practices on related issues. A full-day of training
includes courses on understanding mobile spam, the final Canadian
Anti-spam Legislation (CASL) regulations, IPv6 and other
sessions.
About the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group
(M3AAWG)
The Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group
(M3AAWG) is where the industry comes together to work against bots,
malware, spam, viruses, denial-of-service attacks and other online
exploitation. M3AAWG (www.M3AAWG.org) represents more than one
billion mailboxes from some of the largest network operators
worldwide. It leverages the depth and experience of its global
membership to tackle abuse on existing networks and new emerging
services through technology, collaboration and public policy. It
also works to educate global policy makers on the technical and
operational issues related to online abuse and messaging.
Headquartered in San Francisco, Calif., M3AAWG is driven by market
needs and supported by major network operators and messaging
providers.
M3AAWG Board of Directors: AT&T (NYSE: T); CenturyLink
(NYSE: CTL); Cloudmark, Inc.; Comcast (NASDAQ: CMCSA); Constant
Contact (NASDAQ: CTCT); Cox Communications; Damballa, Inc.;
Facebook; Google; Mailchimp; Oracle/Eloqua; Orange (NYSE and
Euronext: ORA); PayPal; Return Path; Symantec; Time Warner Cable;
Verizon Communications; and Yahoo! Inc.
M3AAWG Full Members: 1&1 Internet AG; Adobe Systems Inc.;
AOL; BAE Systems Detica; Cisco Systems, Inc.; CloudFlare; Dynamic
Network Services Inc.; Email Sender and Provider Coalition;
Experian Marketing Services; iContact; Internet Initiative Japan
(IIJ, NASDAQ: IIJI); LinkedIn; McAfee Inc.; Mimecast; Nominum,
Inc.; Proofpoint; Scality; Spamhaus; Sprint; and Twitter.
A complete member list is available at
http://www.m3aawg.org/about/roster.
Media Contact: Linda Marcus, APR 1+714-974-6356 (U.S. Pacific)
Email Contact Astra Communications
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