As some of you may know, my business mostly involves doing telecom technical consultation for call centers, private communities, and hotels/casinos. So my focus with VoIP has always been at a more 'enterprise' level, for lack of a better term. But obviously I've been paying attention to various consumer offerings like Vonage, MagicJack, etc. Last night I decided to take a small sampling of both a /16 netblock of business cable service and /16 netblock of consumer cable service.
I was astonished to see that of approximately 65000 IP address there were at least 100+ VoIP devices on the standard UDP port of 5060 and of those, I was able to direct dial.. a lot of them. I suspect if I had opened the range of ports from 5060 to 5062 and a few other vendor specific ports, I'd have found even more.
Then I started thinking about the laws associated with the Do Not Call list and the other laws regarding accessing of systems on a public network (the Internet). And as far as I've been able to come up with, if the call is IP to IP, none of existing laws apply -- minus those pertaining to harassment (sans the technology).
What, if anything, is stopping telemarketers from culling a list of IPs with 'vulnerable' VoIP ATAs and servers and skating around the DNC and other regulations relating to telemarketing?
Admittedly, it seems the more professional operations like TWC and Comcast are doing it properly and their digital phone offers remain on their private network and are not accessible from the Internet (thankfully). But a lot of the more generic services haven't done this -- yet. Perhaps once a few more trouble makers realize the potential, we'll see them changing to a more secure and private solution.
Even creepier, I (let's say in theory) would be able to inject images or videos into some of the newer IP based video phones. A new tool for perverts, perhaps? :chin:
God knows as soon as people start taking advantage of this, Congress will overreact and write some silly new law that goes way too far, way too fast.
So now..how many of you have MagicJack and wondered where all those strange calls were coming from? ;)