An important message from Phone Improvements
VOICE MAIL FRAUD
BELL Canada and other Telco
Line Providers have recently identified several cases of
fraud with respect to business voicemail equipment. These
cases involve experience criminals that have illegally
gained access to a company’s voicemail system and then
placed long distance calls from within those systems.
Many businesses and phone
companies around the world have recently fallen victim to
this type of fraud.
What to Beware of:
Fraudsters usually break into a
company’s voicemail system after hours, during holiday
periods or weekends. They employ a variety of manual and
automated techniques to try and guess all the passwords used
to protect access to voicemail equipment. If these
passwords have NOT been changed from their default settings,
or if passwords used are easy to guess (such as 1234 or
1111), it becomes easy for these criminals to gain access to
your voice mail system. Once access has been gained, long
distance calls are initiated, resulting in unexpected
charges.
What You Should Do to Prevent This Risk:
It is imperative for you to
protect yourself against this type of fraud by ensuring your
voicemail equipment is safeguarded and your employees are
educated about password security best practices.
To avoid falling prey to this
scam, we recommend voicemail users do the following:
-
always change the default
password from the one provided by the manufacturer
-
choose a complex voicemail
password of at least six digits, making it more difficult
for a hacker to detect
-
don’t use obvious passwords
such as an address, birth date, phone number, or repeating
or successive numbers,
i.e.
111111, 123456
-
force users to change their
voicemail password at lease
every 90 days
-
consider blocking
international calls, if possible; an
-
consider disabling the remote
notification, auto-attendant, call-forwarding, and
out-paging capabilities of voice mail if these features
are not used
While these precautions are of
a general nature, and might not protect every aspect of an
individual telephone system, they will go a long way to
reducing your vulnerability to this type of fraud.
Customers can request a
billable
audit of their systems’
current settings and
configuration. The audit will provide a customer with
knowledge of what their
current system settings are but
does not guarantee against the possibility of being affected
by Toll
Fraud.
We
encourage you to contact us today!
