NEC technology fights IP phone spam

January 26, 2007, 02:01 PM —  IDG News Service — 

NEC Corp. has developed technology that can help prevent spam phone calls to VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) users.

The company plans to demonstrate the technology next month at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona but still has more work to do before it can sell a commercial product.

The technology discovers whether a caller is a human or a machine by testing the machine's capability to perform human-like conversation. Once the technology determines that a machine has made the call, it blocks the connection, preventing the user's phone from ringing.

NEC has developed the technology so that new modules can quickly be added to the system to respond to new and different kinds of VOIP spam.

In addition, the product will be customizable to work with different types of hardware, such as SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) servers, home network equipment and session border controls.

NEC tested the technology during a simulated VOIP spam attack, using well-known botnets to create the attack. The technology detected nearly all of the VOIP spam in the test, NEC Said. A botnet is a collection of computers that have been infected by malicious code and can be remotely commanded to execute malicious activities.

Existing botnets can easily be modified to produce spam telephone calls, NEC said. The company warned that a high level of VOIP spam could discourage the growth of VOIP.

NEC did not say when a commercial product might become available.

IDG News Service

I like it!
Post a comment
The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
Free books

Essential JavaFX
Get started building rich Web apps quickly with an introduction to the power of JavaFX key features -- scene node graphs, nodes as components, the coordinate system, layout options, colors and gradients, custom classes with inheritance, animation, binding, and event handlers.Enter now!

The Nomadic Developer
Consulting can be hugely rewarding, but it's easy to fail if you are unprepared. To succeed, you need a mentor who knows the lay of the land. Aaron Erickson is your mentor, and this is your guidebook. Enter now!

Featured Sponsor

AISO founders envisioned a Web hosting company that was environmentally friendly. While the company employed energy-efficient innovations like solar panels, its infrastructure produced unacceptable power and cooling requirements. Find out how AISO leveraged AMD technology to overcome their challenge in this case study white paper.

In this whitepaper, Scalar explores the opportunity to change the landscape with respect to mission critical databases built around Oracle. Leveraging technologies such as Linux, high-end commodity processing power and Oracle RAC technology to architect, design, build and maintain database infrastructure that delivers maximum availability, reliability and performance at a fraction of traditional cost.

On a typical day, weather.com, the Web site for The Weather Channel in Atlanta, serves up between 15 million and 20 million page views. But in September 2004, when back-to-back hurricanes ransacked Florida, the peak traffic on one day more than tripled: over 70 million page views by more than 7 million unique visitors. Read the full success story now.

Marketplace