NationMaster - Encyclopedia: VoIP spam

VoIP spam, also called vamming, is the proliferation of unwanted, automatically-dialed, pre-recorded phone calls using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). Some pundits have taken to referring to it as SPIT (for "Spam over Internet Telephony"). IP Telephony, also called Internet telephony, is the technology that makes it possible to have a telephone conversation over the Internet or a dedicated Internet Protocol (IP) network instead of dedicated voice transmission lines. ...

Voice over IP systems, like e-mail and other Internet applications, are susceptible to abuse by malicious parties who initiate unsolicited and unwanted communications. Telemarketers, prank callers, and other telephone system abusers are likely to target VoIP systems increasingly, particularly if VoIP tends to supplant conventional telephony. An overview of how VoIP works A typical analog telephone adapter for connecting an ordinary phone to a VoIP network Ciscos implementation of VoIP - IP Phone Voice over Internet Protocol, also called VoIP (pronounced voyp), IP Telephony, Internet telephony, Broadband telephony, Broadband Phone and Voice over Broadband is the... Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ... Telemarketing office Telemarketing is a method of direct marketing in which a salesperson uses the telephone to solicit prospective customers to buy products or services. ... A prank call, also known as a crank call, hoax call, phony call, or phony phone call is a form of practical joke committed over the telephone. ...

The underlying technology driving this threat is SIP (Session Initiation Protocol, IETF – Internet Engineering Task Force, RFC 3261). This technology has received significant support from most major telecommunication vendors, and is showing signs of becoming the industry standard for voice, video and other interactive forms of communication such as instant messaging and gaming. The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is an application-layer control (signaling) protocol for creating, modifying, and terminating sessions with one or more participants. ...

Similar rules to today’s email systems that block unsolicited email will also prevent unsolicited voice and video communication. This can also be compared to the way today’s chat applications prevent unwanted users from viewing your availability or state of presence by using “privacy” options.

SIP as the technology has been designed to support presence natively. This potentially means that incoming callers will know your availability before even attempting to call or make contact with you. So just like with e-mail today the benefits of communicating with trusted parties electronically far exceeds the pitfalls of e-mail spam, particularly when using preventative technologies to minimise the impact of the issue. E-mail spam, also known as bulk e-mail or junk e-mail is a subset of spam that involves sending nearly identical messages to numerous recipients by e-mail. ...

Resources

Hansen, Markus; Hansen, Marit; Moeller, Jan; Rohwer, Thomas; Tolkmit, Carsten, Waack, Henning: "Developing a Legally Compliant Reachability Management System as a Countermeasure against SPIT", Third Annual VoIP Security Workshop, Berlin, June 2006.

Categories: Articles lacking reliable references from June 2007 | NPOV disputes from August 2007 | Wikipedia articles needing style editing | Spamming | VoIP terminology & concepts | World Wide Web stubs This article is about electronic spam. ... // A possible 19th century mass telegraph In the late 19th Century Western Union allowed telegraphic messages on its network to be sent to multiple destinations. ... The Network Abuse Clearinghouse assembles data on what its sponsors see as misuse of the Internet. ... E-mail spam, also known as bulk e-mail or junk e-mail is a subset of spam that involves sending nearly identical messages to numerous recipients by e-mail. ... Address munging is the practice of disguising, or munging, an e-mail address to prevent it being automatically collected and used as a target for people and organizations who send unsolicited bulk e-mail. ... Bulk email software is software that is used to send email in large quantities. ... Dictionary spamming is a spamming technique where spammers attempt to guess E-mail addresses by using a dictionary attack based on adding plausible names as prefixes to known domain names. ... A Directory Harvest Attack or DHA is a technique used by spammers in an attempt to find e-mail addresses. ... A DNS Blacklist, or DNSBL (definition below), is a means by which an Internet site may publish a list of IP addresses that some people may want to avoid and in a format which can be easily queried by computer programs on the Internet. ... A spambot is a program designed to collect, or harvest, e-mail addresses from the Internet in order to build mailing lists for sending unsolicited e-mail, also known as spam. ... A pink contract is an agreement between an email spammer and his Internet service provider. ... An auto-dialer is an electronic device that can automatically dial telephone numbers to communicate between any two points in the telephone, mobile phone and pager networks. ... Flyposting is the act of placing advertising posters or flyers in illegal places. ... Messaging spam, sometimes called SPIM, is a type of spam targeting users of instant messaging services. ... Mobile phone spam is a form of spamming directed at the text messaging service of a mobile phone. ... Newsgroup spam is a type of spamming where the targets are Usenet newsgroups. ... Telemarketing office Telemarketing is a method of direct marketing in which a salesperson uses the telephone to solicit prospective customers to buy products or services. ... To prevent e-mail spam, both end users and administrators of e-mail systems use various anti-spam techniques. ... Disposable e-mail addressing (DEA) refers to an alternative way of sharing and managing e-mail addressing. ... Ensuring a valid identity on an e-mail has become a vital first step in stopping spam, forgery, fraud, and even more serious crimes. ... SORBS (Spam and Open Relay Blocking System) is a controversial open proxy and open mail relay DNSBL. It has been augmented with complementary lists that include various other classes of hosts, allowing for customized email rejection by its users. ... SpamCop is a free spam reporting service, allowing recipients of unsolicited bulk email (UBE) and unsolicited commercial email (UCE) to report the offense to the senders Internet Service Provider (ISP), and sometimes their web host. ... The Spamhaus Project is a volunteer effort founded by Steve Linford in 1998 that aims to track e-mail spammers and spam-related activity. ... List poisoning is a tactic for detecting or diverting e-mail spammers by tricking them into including invalid addresses into mailing lists. ... Bayesian spam filtering (pronounced Bays-ee-en, IPA pronunciation: , after Rev. ... Spamdexing or search engine spamming is the practice of deliberately creating web pages which will be indexed by search engines in order to increase the chance of a website or page being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page... Keyword stuffing is considered to be an unethical Search engine optimization (SEO) technique. ... Example of a Google bomb. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... On the World Wide Web, a link farm is any group of web pages that all hyperlink to every other page in the group. ... A webring in general is a collection of websites from around the Internet joined together in a circular structure. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Doorway pages are web pages that are created for spamdexing, this is, for spamming the index of a search engine by inserting results for particular phrases with the purpose of sending you to a different page. ... URL redirection, also called URL forwarding, domain redirection and domain forwarding, is a technique on the World Wide Web for making a web page available under many URLs. ... Link spam (also called blog spam or comment spam) is a form of spamming or spamdexing that recently became publicized most often when targeting weblogs (or blogs), but also affects wikis (where it is often called wikispam), guestbooks, and online discussion boards. ... Sping is short for ping spam. Pings are messages sent from blog and publishing tools to a centralized network service (Ping Server) providing notification of newly published posts or content. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... Spam in blogs (also called simply blog spam or comment spam) is a form of spamdexing. ... Referer spam is a kind of spamdexing (spamming aimed at search engines). ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... An advance-fee fraud is a confidence trick in which the target is persuaded to advance relatively small sums of money in the hope of realizing a much larger gain. ... A typical lottery scam begins with an unexpected email notification that You have won! a large sum of money in a lottery. ... Make money fast is a title of an electronically forwarded chain letter which became so infamous that the term is now used to describe all sorts of chain letters forwarded over the Internet, by e-mail spam or Usenet newsgroups. ... Microcap stock fraud, also known as microcap fraud, is a form of securities fraud involving stocks of microcap companies, generally defined as having a market capitalization of under $250 million. ... An example of a phishing email, disguised as an official email from a (fictional) bank. ... There are very few or no other articles that link to this one. ...