ALUGgers who watched this evening's "Look East" will have
seen that dialup phone fraud is in the news again -- people
getting phone bills for hundreds of pounds for internet
calls to Vanuatu, Chile, etc. on premium rates. Some
Linux-users may have seen it too!
What I'd like to ask knowledgeable folk is: how does it
in fact work?
I've never seen more than a vague description of it, on
the lines that when one is on line "the call is diverted
to a premium rate number", apparently through some subversion
of Internet Explorer.
Well, just how does that happen? Does it disconnect and then
immediately dial out to a new number, unnoiticed by the user?
Does it change the dialup settings as originally stored in
some system file and use these thereafter? By what mechanisms
are these activities mediated?
This is not really a question about IE, though I'm sure
that some "feature" of IE has a lot to do with it.
I'm also interested in the question of how "generalisable"
this mechanism might be: is it a transferrable skill, so
that what can be done to IE today could be done to Netscape,
Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, ... , tomorrow?
(I find it reassuring that kppp throws up a window during
the dialup process in which the dialog with the modem is
shown, so that one can actually see what number is being
dialled.)
Thanks in advance for informed replies!
Ted.
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E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk>
Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 [NB: New number!]
Date: 25-Nov-04 Time: 19:11:57
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