Offshore hacker's wave of calls swamped triple zero
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An overseas phone hacker onslaught of more than a thousand offshore calls tripped up the triple zero emergency call service on Saturday morning sparking a government investigation and raising questions about Telstra’s handling of the situation which left some Australians waiting up to nine hours for a call back.
Between 6.09am and 7.55am on May 26, there were three short periods where 600 calls at a time were directed to Australia’s 000 call centres, which are run run by Telstra. These were ‘blank’ calls with no one on the other end and the high volume resulted in genuine emergency calls from across the country going unanswered.
A second issue on the Triple Zero line is being investigated by the government.
Photo: James Davies
The mass dials originated from a customer of telecommunications company Vocus.
A Vocus spokesman confirmed one of its customers’ phone exchange systems had been compromised “enabling an external party to attempt international toll fraud”. Toll fraud is when a hacker fraudulently gains access to a phone system to make calls.
He said the telco’s fraud filters meant algorithmically-generated attempts to call international numbers failed, but some of the calls included a prefix of 000, which routed to emergency services.
Article source: http://smh.com.au/queensland/massive-workshop-fire-sparks-evacuations-in-brisbane-s-north-20170924-p4yw2p.html
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