FBI unveils International toll fraud organization

A cross continent toll fraud operation was uncovered by FBI and national law enforcement agencies in Italy, Philippines and other countries.
The investigation has been ongoing since 2006 and relates to conduct ranging from October 2005 through December 2008.

The scam financiers, Pakistani nationals residing in Italy hired the services of professional crackers-for-hire and paid the amount of $100 for each PBX they could break into. Those financiers allegedly used the compromised systems to transmit over 12 million minutes of telephone calls valued at more than $55 million over the hacked networks of victim corporations in the United States alone.

Exploited Asterisk servers are to blame for recent vishing attacks

Recent vishing attacks have been conducted by criminal taking advantage of a known bug in older Asterisk PBX systems. According to an FBI advisory published on The Internet Crime Complaint Center the attackers exploited the known bug to gain unauthorized access to numerous Asterisk PBX systems and later used these systems as mass auto-dialers. The attackers generated thousends of calls to victims in which they attempted to extract sensitive information from the victims.
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