Comments on: Call Centers Will Get More Annoying

By: Douglas Rea

Douglas Rea — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 02:17:04 +0000

MOBILE TREK (Because In Space No One Can Hear You Dial), is a humorous, zany, off-the-wall lampoon of mobile phone call centres and is currently available in e-book form from http://www.ereadable.com. For anyone who ever worked in a call centre, or had to phone one and thought they were connected to some spacecraft in the distant future. USS Cellforce 1 is an intergalactic mobile phone call centre, in which Captain Pilchard battles other networks for communications supremacy.
“Anything resembling anything living…..isn’t???
Kind Regards,
Douglas Rea.
douglasrea@bigpond.com

By: albatross

albatross — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 21:41:24 +0000

I wonder how hard it would be to automate (or semi-automate) running the grandmaster’s attack on this kind of scheme.
Alice calls Mallory, Mallory calls Trent, and then each question Trent asks gets reflected back to Alice from Mallory.
An even easier version would be to reroute the call (how many people are calling over relatively vulnerable VOIP?), play silent man in the middle until the authentication is done, and then “get disconnected” and do whatever bad stuff is to be done.

By: David Brodbeck

David Brodbeck — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 17:37:55 +0000

This also leads to the possibility of inadvertently creating the impression of bias if the questions aren’t chosen carefully. An example would be the TSA employee who asked someone their political affiliation. They were just checking to see if it matched what was in the computer, but the implication was that Democrats and Republicans might be treated differently.

By: Vox Libertas aka Jim Burrows

Vox Libertas aka Jim Burrows — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 16:17:10 +0000

Umm… But…
If the call center or a call center employee can verify such a question from the documents in their database, then another call center or call center employee can spoof the subject by answering based on the same body of information.
This assumes taht the bad guys have no computer resources. At the very least it is unwise to either assume that the bot herders have no resources or that no call center can be infiltrated.
This isn’t just intrusive. It is ill considered and stupid.