My family has been the target of a harassments campaign by a group of young teenage boys because my sibling has a small following on YouTube and for some reason these dweebs have decided to make it their life’s mission to bully my sib off the internet. Because Sib has fortified all means of communication online and is no longer reachable, the harassers have been contacting me and anyone associated with Sib by sending threatening texts and voice mails through spoofed numbers. The police are involved on Sib’s side of things, but I’m just curious how these idiots are managing to spoof their numbers to attack us daily. What’s the mechanism for this? How does it work?
In: Technology
Despite all of the advances in technology since then, the current phone system still inherits a lot of properties of some of the earliest phone systems, and those phone systems prioritized reliability over security.
A lot of the ‘rules’ for how the phone networks were put together attempted to keep it all as simple as possible in order to make it all interact reliably, and as newer features like caller ID and whatnot were piled on top of it, they often had to be implemented in fairly simplistic and insecure ways in order to not break compatibility with existing older parts of the overall phone system.
The end result of all of this is that basically when someone makes a phone call, they can report whatever they want as their phone number, and the system doesn’t have any way of verifying it.
The solution to this is government regulation requiring all of the phone companies to upgrade everything to more secure systems, but that would cost the phone companies a lot of money and effort, so they’ve lobbied pretty hard to avoid such regulations from passing.
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