Voice Phishing: System to Trace Telephone Call Paths Across Multiple Networks Developed

in news & announcements / on October 9, 2010 at 6:59 pm /

Phishing scams are making the leap from email to the world’s voice systems, and a team of researchers in the Georgia Tech College of Computing has found a way to tag fraudulent calls with a digital “fingerprint” that will help separate legitimate calls from phone scams.

Voice phishing (or “vishing”) has become much more prevalent with the advent of cellular and voice IP (VoIP) networks, which enable criminals both to route calls through multiple networks to avoid detection and to fake caller ID information.

However each network through which a call is routed leaves its own telltale imprint on the call itself, and individual phones have their own unique signatures, as well.

Funded in part by the National Science Foundation, the Georgia Tech team created a system called “PinDr0p” that can analyze and assemble those call artifacts to create a fingerprint — the first step in determining “call provenance,” a term the researchers coined.

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