[Gllug] Internet dial-up scam

[Richard Jones]

On Wed, Apr 07, 2004 at 03:15:40PM +0100, Dylan wrote:
> On Wednesday 07 April 2004 01:38 am, David Damerell wrote:
> > On Tuesday, 6 Apr 2004, Chris Bell wrote:
> > >I have just been listening to BBC Watchdog who are reporting that a
> > > new dial-up scam is putting a virus on PCs causing them to
> > > repeatedly connect and disconnect to premium rate phone numbers,
> > > knocking up huge phone bills which are difficult to disprove.
> >
> > How do you mean, disprove? They connected a device to the phone line
> > of their own free will which really did dial those numbers.
> 
> Moral of the story - unplug modem when not in use and check the dialup 
> number each time - easy.

I think the moral is probably to use an operating system which
provides more visibility on what is actually running.  If a window
comes up saying that it's dialing 0845 ... when in fact it's dialing
00234... then that doesn't help me a lot.

Even Linux doesn't get this right.  It would take a very secure
operating system with different zones and trust levels.  Hello Trusted
Computing[*]!

Rich.

[*] Or I could just go and get an old Burroughs computer which had all
this stuff back in the '70s.

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