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Hackoween !

October 30, 2020 By

Trick or Treat !

Halloween is a time for dress-up, spooky decorations and children going door-to-door trick-or-treating. We want something normal in this pandemic-crazed world, hence we decorate the house, buy the candy and try to have a normal a Halloween as possible.

But while your attention is drawn away to making sure your kids, family and your neighbourhood have as safe a Halloween as possible, there are malicious actors out there looking to take advantage of your desire for a bit of respite, a bit of normalcy.

It is an unfortunate fact that the hackers of the world like to plan their attacks on public holidays when network supervision may not be at its highest. Halloween may not be a pubic holiday, but it might as well be given that everyone will be out celebrating; kids, parents and adults going to costume parties. On top of that we are still in the fight against COVID-19, and the criminals have escalated their attacks.


Please remember to be vigilant this Halloween and guard access to your switches. We don’t want to find out that instead of the expected treats that the criminals have tricked us !


You are responsible for any unauthorized access to your network, but we can help you mitigate your exposure to fraud. AurorA will immediately pass on alerts that it gets of suspicious traffic patterns. AurorA has also implemented automatic blocking of A numbers, and B numbers once we detect a suspicious fraudulent traffic pattern to minimize losses. Also we have also implemented blocking of entire routing destinations after a threshold is breached to further protect you, our customers, from these threats and mitigate the damage.


Make no mistake, these frauds are perpetrated by criminals; sometimes organized crime, sometimes terrorist groups looking to raise funds for their causes.


Have a safe and happy Halloween. Thank you for choosing AurorA and trusting us with your international traffic.

Filed Under: Fraud

Least Corrupt Routing

October 8, 2020 By
“Awake” by Vickie Vainionpaa, https://vickievainionpaa.com/

LCR is no longer about Least Cost. Least Corrupt Routing provides better long term value.

That was the theme of the presentaion that I made on Sept 16, 2020 at the Risk and Assurance Group (RAG) Americas Online Conference.

The video is available for your viewing pleasure at https://vimeo.com/462621895

Filed Under: Fraud, International, Quality

RAG Americas Online – Day 2

September 17, 2020 By
Art by Vickie Vainionpää, “The Third Insight” – https://vickievainionpaa.com/

This spring I was invited to be a speaker at the next Risk and Assurance Group (RAG) Conference. It was to be held in Denver, CO at Century Link (now Lumen). Alas , the COVID-19 pandemic scuttled those plans so until we can meet-up again live, it was decided to move the conference online and RAG Americas Online virtual conference was launched. September 16, 2020 was Day 2.

The highlight of Day 2 was the panel discussion on “Moving Telcos to the Public Cloud”. The panelists were Clodagh Durkan an expert in the fields of security governance, data protection, cryptography and perimeter threat detection ; Patrick Donegan the founder and principal analyst of Hardenstance, a research business focused on telecom and IT security ; and Danielle Royston former CEO of Optiva and Evangelist for the Cloud.

Most industries have already made the move to the cloud, after dipping their toes in it they have gone all in with their whole businesses. Even former skeptics and holdouts such as JP Morgan Chase have become cloud advocates .

The premise was that telcos need to move their software and datasets from their own data centres to the public cloud; specifically the hyperscalers ; Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft’s Azure and Google’s Google Cloud. The immediate benefits are dramatically reduced costs, increased flexibility and security and then abundant opportunities for growth and improvement by using the tools and software that the clouds provide. The clouds are not commodities nor necessarily competitors , they offer the opportunity for telcos to evolve and become better.

There were many questions from the audience and objections were raised on multiple fronts. The hyperscalers are all American companies (and we didnt include Alibaba from China and others on the list). It was noted that the public cloud companies have locations in almost every country and can contractually tailor the solutions to satisfy stringent government data localization requirements.

What about security ? The point was made that the hyperscalers are orders of magnitude more vigilant about security than even the largest telco would be. They have the staff, budget and experience to do it better. The telco can hand off that headache and hold the cloud companies feet to the fire via the contractual obligations.

Some large telcos have started to move towards the cloud. Examples such as Vodafone , Deutsche Telekom and Verizon were touted with specific projects. It may take time for telcos to fully relinquish their perceived investments in control, the desire to “hug their own servers”.

This is an area I will be watching with eager anticipation. I know if I was younger and just starting out again I would defiantly build AurorA 2.0 as a native cloud company and take advantage of the software tools such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning that a company AurorA’s size wouldn’t be able to afford otherwise. The cloud really tips the scales to level the playing field for smaller entrepreneurial companies to be able to compete with even global giants.

If you didn’t get a chance to watch the live stream, the videos of the presentations will be available to view at the RAG website;
https://riskandassurancegroup.org/

I highly recommend searching out this panel discussion to view and digest for anyone in telecom, anywhere in the world.

Filed Under: Cloud

RAG Americas Online – Day 1

September 15, 2020 By
Matt hard at work getting RAG Americas Online ready to rock !

This spring I was invited to be a speaker at the next Risk and Assurance Group (RAG) Conference. It was to be held in Denver, CO at Century Link. Alas , the COVID-19 pandemic scuttled those plans so until we can meet-up again live, it was decided to move the conference online and RAG Americas Online virtual conference was launched. Today, September 15, 2020 was Day 1.

There was a mix of about a dozen presentations and panel discussions interspersed with commentary from the Wise Heads comperes; Eric Priezkalns, Rachel Goodin, Nixon Wampamba and Tony Sani . Canadians were well represented with 3 speakers today and 3 tomorrow (including me) from companies like Telus, Rogers and Xplorenet.

From my vantage the most relevant panel was the discussion on Trends in Fraud Management, especially during this pandemic. Which frauds are up, which are down and what is new ? The consensus was a large increase in social engineering and identity fraud (all manner of phishing schemes), as well as increases in CLID spoofing. Reinforcing that was an expert panel just on stopping the spoofing of calls !

A recurring theme through many of todays presentations was Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) and their application in Revenue Assurance and Business Assurance. It appeared as more than just a way to automate fraud management, more as a set of tools to be able to transform the entire discipline and provide better business results.

If the telcos manage to move their massive data sets (the industry with the biggest data sets apparently) into the public cloud and could use AI/ML tools along with the other benefits that cloud brings, we could really see a profound transformation of the telecom industry ! That will be the panel discussion on Day 2 that I am most looking forward to; Moving Telcos to the Public Cloud.

If you didn’t get a chance to watch the live stream today, the videos of the presentations will be available to view at the RAG website;
https://riskandassurancegroup.org/

I will post a summary of Day 2 later followed by a separate post of my own presentation on Least Corrupt Routing.

Filed Under: Cloud, Fraud

RAG Americas Online: Sep 15-16

August 27, 2020 By

Coronavirus may have prevented RAG’s North American conference from being held at the offices of CenturyLink in Denver CO, but it will not stop us from running the biggest conference for telecoms risk professionals. Over 2,000 people from 93 countries watched RAG London Online in May (see my posts here and here) and we intend to do even better with our online North American conference, which will stream live on September 15-16, 2020.

RAG was kind enough to ask me to be a speaker this go around. I will be exploring how telecom carriers can meet multiple goals such as increase revenues, reduce costs and improve their customer’s satisfaction via one action; their LCR. The new LCR is Least Corrupt Routing and it provides better long term value and business outcomes than traditional Least Cost Routing by prioritizing Quality over simple cost per minute.

Most of the RAG members come from large global carriers like Vodafone, MTN, Deutsche Telekom, etc so AurorA will provide a different perspective; one from a smaller, niche, nimble pure international carrier that has been serving its wholesale customers in Canada, the United States and overseas since 1994

Come watch and ask questions live from 8am to 5pm Eastern time each day; click here to save the event to your calendar. You can watch the entire conference at the RAG webpage, without needing to register in advance.

Filed Under: Fraud, International, Quality

Civic Holiday Long Weekend

July 29, 2020 By
Its a long weekend, pull up your Muskoka chair and clink glasses ! Cheers !

Monday August third is the Civic Holiday ! If you are in Toronto, “Simcoe Day”; Ottawa “Colonel By Day”; “John Galt Day” in Guelph; “Terry Fox Day” in Manitoba. It has different names all across the country (except for Quebec cause they took Saint-Jean Baptiste Day off in June). What is the Civic Holiday for ? A day to relax and enjoy ! Cheers !

It is an unfortunate fact that the hackers of the world like to plan their attacks on public holidays when network supervision may not be at its highest. On top of that we are still in the fight against COVID-19, and the criminals have escalated their attacks. Furthermore, our friends south of the border will not be celebrating anything which means the hackers will be focussed on us !

Please remember to be vigilant this Civic Holiday and guard access to your switches.

AurorA has to deliver any traffic that is sent to it , so you are responsible for any unauthorized access to your network. AurorA will pass on any alerts that it gets of suspicious traffic patterns. AurorA has also implemented automatic blocking of B numbers once we detect a suspicious fraudulent traffic pattern in an attempt to minimize losses. Also we have also implemented blocking of entire routing destinations after a threshold is breached to further protect you, our customers, from these criminals and mitigate the damage.

Make no mistake, these frauds are perpetrated by criminals; sometimes organized crime, sometimes terrorist groups looking to raise funds for their causes.

Have a safe and happy holiday. Thank you for choosing AurorA and trusting us with your international traffic.
Timo Vainionpaa

Filed Under: Adventure, Fraud
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