Cybersecurity attacks happen all too often, and attackers are becoming more bold and sophisticated by disrupting critical phone systems and putting 911 emergency call centers at risk. Similar to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on critical online services, Telephony Denial of Service (TDoS) attacks render emergency systems unavailable by saturating them with bogus calls and potentially causing great harm to those who truly require urgent first responder attention.  

Robocalls have been on the rise in the United States: An estimated 4.1 billion robocalls were made nationwide in June alone, according to data compiled by YouMail, an app that aims to prevent robocalls by playing an out-of-service message from your phone. Since February this year, the number of robocalls made to phone users across the country has risen more than 40 percent, it says.

Scammers are flooding the United States with Chinese-language robocalls, causing major headaches from coast to coast.

The plague of robocalls is getting worse. Consumers received more than 18 billion in 2017, a 75 percent increase from the year before. They are the number one consumer complaint to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). It receives more than 200,000 protests a year, and robocalls make up roughly 60 percent of all complaints to the FCC.

Remember when phone calls meant people wanted to talk to you about something other than lowering your interest rates? These days, the phone rings so often with recorded robocall messages—You qualify! You owe! You’ve won!—answering feels like a hazard.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A federal appeals court on Friday threw out a $229,500 award that a Texas woman had won from Time Warner Cable Inc for harassing her with 153 robocalls after she told it to stop.

If you live in Washington, D.C., or another U.S. metropolitan area, you may have noticed that you’re on the receiving end of a barrage of Chinese-language robo-calls. The calls bring alarming news, and federal regulators and law-enforcement agencies say the automated messages are part of a nationwide scam targeting Chinese communities in the United States.

By nature, criminals who choose to commit their crimes over the internet are on a mission to find new and creative ways to simultaneously defraud both consumers and companies. It doesn’t help that traditional contact center authentication methodologies are easily circumvented by social engineering, which enables fraudsters to prosper.

4.1 billion. That’s the number of robocalls made to American consumers last month, according to the robocall index operated by YouMail, a robocall blocking service.

Rebecca Schulte, 24, was at her apartment in West Hollywood, California, when she received a call from a familiar area code. She picked up.

The Federal Trade Commission has strict rules that, in its own words, make “virtually all” telemarketing robocalls illegal. But we’ve still seen the number of complaints about robocalls explode over the last few years. On Tuesday, the FTC announced it’s doing something about it by suing some kingpins who allegedly facilitated billions of unwanted calls.

That phone call that appears to be from your neighbor but turns out to be a sales pitch or worse, a scam, is the latest ruse by robocallers.

It’s called neighbor spoofing and the calls seem to be surging, particularly in the 210 area code.

If you've picked up the phone only to hear the start of an automatic recording, you're not alone. Roughly 16.3 billion of these calls have been placed just in the first five months of 2018, according to the YouMail Robocall Index.

The telephone swept into Americans’ lives in the first decades of the 20th century. At first, no one knew exactly how to telephone. Alexander Graham Bell wanted people to start conversations by saying, “Ahoy-hoy!” AT&T tried to prevent people from saying “hello,” arguing in Telephone Engineer magazine that it was rude.

“I AM not the kingpin of robocalling that is alleged.” So Adrian Abramovich, a telemarketer from Florida, assured American senators in April. Accused of making nearly 100m illegal “robocalls” in 2016 as part of a campaign to sell discounted holidays, Mr Abramovich has denied criminal wrongdoing. Nonetheless, on May 10th the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), America’s telecoms regulator, fined him $120m, the largest penalty in the agency’s history.