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DHS, SecureLogix develop TDoS attack defense
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and vendor SecureLogix are making 'rapid progress' in developing a TDoS attack defense. The technology is expected in the coming months.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has partnered with security firm SecureLogix to develop technology to defend against telephony denial-of-service attacks, which remain a significant threat to emergency call centers, banks, schools and hospitals.
The DHS Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate said this week the office and SecureLogix were making "rapid progress" in developing defenses against call spoofing and robocalls -- two techniques used by criminals in launching telephony denial-of-service (TDoS) attacks to extort money. Ultimately, the S&T's goal is to "shift the advantage from TDoS attackers to network administrators."
To that end, S&T and SecureLogix, based in San Antonio, are developing two TDoS attack defenses. First is a mechanism for identifying the voice recording used in call spoofing, followed by a means to separate legitimate emergency calls from robocalls.
"Several corporations, including many banks and DHS components, have expressed interest in this technology, and SecureLogix will release it into the market in the coming months," William Bryan, interim undersecretary for S&T at DHS, said in a statement.
In 2017, S&T handed SecureLogix a $100,000 research award to develop anticall-spoofing technology. The company was one of a dozen small tech firms that received similar amounts from S&T to create a variety of security applications.
Filtering out TDoS attack calls
SecureLogix's technology analyzes and assigns a threat score to each incoming call in real time. Calls with a high score are either terminated or redirected to a lower-priority queue or a third-party call management service.
SecureLogix built its prototype on existing voice security technologies, so it can be deployed in complex voice networks, according to S&T. It also contains a business rules management system and a machine learning engine "that can be extended easily, with limited software modifications."
Over the last year, SecureLogix deployed the prototype within a customer facility, a cloud environment and a service provider network. The vendor also worked with a 911 emergency call center and large financial institutions.
In March 2013, a large-scale TDoS attack highlighted the threat against the telephone systems of public-sector agencies. An alert issued by DHS and the FBI said extortionists had launched dozens of attacks against the administrative telephone lines of air ambulance and ambulance organizations, hospitals and financial institutions.
Today, the need for TDoS protection has grown from on premises to the cloud, where an increasing number of companies and call centers are signing up for unified communications as a service. In 2017, nearly half of organizations surveyed by Nemertes Research were using or planned to use cloud-based UC.
