Spoofing is the act of disguising or falsifying information and communications to deceive someone for malicious purpose. Of the various forms of spoofing (email, IP, DNS, and others), caller ID spoofing represents a unique threat to businesses and contact centers. Enterprises have made digital forms of spoofing-based fraud more difficult by deploying better email filters and adopting stronger cybersecurity measures. These defenses have unintentionally driven attackers to the weakest link: voice systems and the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).
To defend against malicious actions using spoofed calling numbers — and to prevent the serious consequences of these attacks — businesses and contact centers must adopt robust spoofing protection for their voice networks. The most effective strategy is a multilayered approach to spoofing protection that involves authentication protocols, caller verification tools, voice network-level protections for inbound and outbound spoofing attempts, and employee and agent training.
What is Caller ID Spoofing?
Caller ID spoofing is a tactic used by criminals to manipulate the caller ID information displayed on the phone of a person receiving a call. Rather than showing the true origin of the call, caller ID will display a different number, name, or organization, often chosen by the attacker to build trust with the recipient.
While spoofing itself is not an attack, it is often used to make a variety of attacks more successful.
Scams IRS scams, tech-support scams, and other impersonation scams almost always use spoofed calling numbers to impersonate a legitimate organization and dupe the victim.
Voice Spam Telemarketers, survey takers, and debt collectors often spoof caller IDs to increase the likelihood that someone will answer the phone.
Vishing Voice phishing, or vishing, is a type of social engineering attack where callers pose as a trusted individual and attempt to dupe a recipient of a phone call into revealing sensitive information.
Telephony Denial of Service (TDoS) This type of denial-of-service attack floods a business or contact center with an overwhelming number of phone calls to disrupt operations. Spoofing the calling numbers makes this attack more difficult to detect.
Account Takeover In this type of financial fraud, attackers make calls to a contact center and attempt to gain control of a legitimate user’s account. Caller ID spoofing is often used as a way of building credibility.
Bomb Threats When calling schools or businesses to disrupt operations with a bomb scare, attackers frequently spoof a known number like a local police department to increase the likelihood that the call will be answered.
SWATing In SWAT attacks that falsely report the need for police or a SWAT team, attackers may spoof the caller ID of the location where they want these resources to deploy.
Inbound vs. Outbound Spoofing Protection
Caller ID spoofing represents two types of threats to a business or contact center, and each requires a different form of spoofing protection.
Inbound Spoofing refers to threat of attackers who manipulate a caller ID as they pretend to be a trusted entity — a bank, a customer, or government agency, for example — building trust to gain access to sensitive information or to infiltrate systems. Inbound spoofing requires protection that can block, flag, or redirect suspicious calls through call filtering and call authentication.
Outbound Spoofing is a threat of damage to a business or contact center’s reputation when its calling numbers are spoofed by attackers attempting to conduct fraudulent actions. When a business’s calling numbers are spoofed, it can damage the brand, cause a lack of trust among customers, and reduce the likelihood that customers will answer legitimate calls from the business. Outbound spoofing requires protection that prevents malicious actors from using enterprise calling numbers for fraud and scams.
The Impact of Spoofing-Based Attacks
The potential impact of spoofing-based attacks makes effective spoofing protection for voice networks a high priority for businesses and their IT teams. Without adequate spoofing protection, businesses may suffer several kinds of setbacks.
Financial Losses
When criminals successfully use spoofing-based attacks to defraud businesses or gain access to customer accounts, the financial losses can be significant. In addition to direct monetary losses resulting from fraudulent transfers, the cost of lawsuits, regulatory fines, and loss of potential business can be financially devastating.
Reputational Damage
When businesses or contact centers succumb to a spoofing-based attack, the damage to reputation can be swift and severe. Customers and partners may lose trust in the business, causing business opportunities to evaporate and net worth to drop.
Operational Disruption
Successful spoofing-based attacks inevitably cause disruption to normal business operations. The tasks of remediation and forensic reporting also consume significant resources and a great deal of employees’ time.
The Limitations of Traditional Spoofing Protection
In recent years, organizations have deployed a variety of spoofing protection technologies with varying success. While these approaches offer some security, most are limited in their ability to prevent inbound or outbound caller ID spoofing.
Managed Blacklists Blacklists are lists of phone numbers associated with scammers and fraudsters which companies can use to block these call from reaching employees or agents. Blacklists are provided by vendors who regularly update the lists based on threat intelligence and user complaints. However, blacklists offer no protection against spoofed calling numbers that are not on the list. And since scammers and robocallers know about blacklists and the numbers on them, they can easily choose numbers that are not on the blacklist.
Authentication Protocols By ensuring that the identity of the caller matches the information displayed on the caller ID, caller authentication protocols can mitigate the effects of spoofing-based attacks. The STIR/SHAKEN (Secure Telephony Identity Revisited/Secure Handling of Asserted information using toKENs) framework, for example, assigns a digital certificate to each call, ensuring that the displayed number has not been altered during transmission. However, while STIR/SHAKEN is effective for calls transmitted over Voiceover Internet Protocol (VoIP), it’s less effective for traditional analog lines and its effectiveness diminishes in areas where the framework is not supported by telecom providers.
Knowledge-Based Authentication (KBA) This authentication procedure, commonly used in financial contact centers, identifies and authenticates the caller by asking questions that only the caller should know the answers to. While this offers some spoofing protection, it is expensive for businesses and frustrating for consumers.
Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) 2FA adds an extra layer of security by requiring callers to confirm their identity through a second message like a code sent via SMS, an authentication app, or a biometric verification. While this method adds an extra layer of security for sensitive transactions, it doesn’t directly prevent spoofed calls.
Call Firewalls Voice network firewalls can filter out malicious traffic before it reaches the organization’s phone system. However, firewalls require frequent maintenance and tuning, and they typically rely on predefined rules and known threat patterns, making them less effective against new or sophisticated spoofing techniques.
Caller Verification Tools This type of spoofing protection provides real-time insight into the legitimacy of callers and helps to filter and flag suspicious activity. Call analytics software, for example, analyzes incoming and outgoing call data to identify unusual patterns of activity and flag suspicious calls. However, high levels of false positives and negatives may cause these technologies to fail to detect sophisticated spoofing attempts or to flag legitimate calls as suspicious.
Carrier-Integrated Solutions Many telecom providers now offer advanced spoofing detection and prevention tools that are integrated directly into their networks. The quality of spoofing detection varies between carriers, and businesses relying on multiple providers may experience inconsistent protection.
Security Awareness Training Since human error is one of the weakest links in call spoofing protection, training employees and contact center agents to recognize the signs of a spoofing-based threat may prevent many attacks. However, even well-trained employees and agents can fall for sophisticated spoofing attempts. Frequent turnover in contact centers makes it difficult to maintain consistent levels of training and awareness across the team.
SecureLogix: A Unified Approach to Spoofing Protection
SecureLogix provides a single, unified solution set that addresses a full range of voice security and call trust issues. From protection from spoofing and TDoS attacks to solutions that stop contact center fraud, robocalls and vishing scams, our solutions offer proven defenses against a wide range of telephony-based threats, and we have assembled the most skilled team in the industry to monitor and protect some of the world’s largest and most complex contact centers and voice networks.
SecureLogix offers spoofing protection that addresses the threats of both inbound and outbound spoofing.
Orchestra One™ Call Authentication Service: Automatically Authenticating Every Caller
For inbound spoofing protection, SecureLogix offers Orchestra One™, a cloud-based auto-authentication and spoofing detection solution that’s smart, efficient, and affordable enough to scale across an entire enterprise voice network. By analyzing and orchestrating thousands of call details along with real-time carrier network metadata (including STIR/SHAKEN when present), Orchestra One™ enables your employees or contact center agents to confidently interact with inbound callers without putting them tedious and costly security integrations. As a result, you can increase security, improve the customer experience, and enhance contact center productivity. To mitigate the high cost of call authentication, Orchestra One™ dynamically orchestrates multiple low-cost and zero-cost metadata services to authenticate each call at the lowest possible price.
Key Benefits
Increased Security Identify trusted callers before the call is answered.
Reduced Call Duration Reduce CX calls by up to 30 seconds with automated
Reduced CX Costs Achieve up to 20% reduction in contact center costs through automation.
True Call™ Spoofing Protection Service: Blocking Outbound Spoofing Attempts
For outbound spoofing protection, SecureLogix TrueCall™ Spoofing Protection Service identifies and blocks spoofed calls attempting to impersonate your brand by using your corporate calling numbers. The TrueCall™ filtering solution is a network API-integrated service that offers the industry’s strongest and most secure approach to spoofing prevention.
Key Benefits
Stop malicious actors from spoofing your enterprise calling numbers.
Enhance call answer rates by protecting your legitimate outbound enterprise calls from being labeled as spam or fraud.
Enjoy the strongest spoofing protection based on API-enabled, carrier network-level filtering.
FAQ
Q: How do scammers spoof a calling number?
Scammers spoof calling numbers by manipulating the caller ID data transmitted during a call. They commonly use VoIP services or specialized spoofing software that allows them to customize the displayed number. Some scammers exploit vulnerabilities in telecom protocols to intercept and alter caller ID information.
Q: How does call spoofing impact contact centers?
Call spoofing may impact contact centers by causing increased customer complaints, operational disruptions, and reputational harm. Agents may struggle to differentiate between genuine and spoofed calls, risking data breaches or unauthorized actions. Contact centers also face potential financial losses and regulatory penalties. Ultimately, spoofing erodes customer confidence and creates additional burdens for staff and systems.
Q: How can contact center agents recognize spoofed calls?
Contact center agents can recognize spoofed calls by looking for inconsistencies in caller behavior, such as unusual urgency or requests for sensitive information. Verifying caller details using internal systems, like customer account information or security questions, can help detect fraudulent attempts. Red flags include mismatched caller ID information, odd call origins, or scenarios where the caller avoids standard verification processes. Training agents to recognize phishing techniques and escalate suspicious calls to supervisors adds an extra layer of protection. Regular updates on spoofing trends can also help agents stay vigilant.
Q: What is the STIR/SHAKEN protocol?
The STIR/SHAKEN protocol is a set of standards designed to combat caller ID spoofing by verifying the authenticity of phone calls. STIR (Secure Telephony Identity Revisited) ensures that the caller’s identity is digitally signed by the originating carrier, while SHAKEN (Secure Handling of Asserted information using toKENs) enforces these standards across telecom networks. Together, they assign a digital certificate to each call, validating the caller ID information as it passes through the network. This helps recipients and carriers identify and block spoofed or fraudulent calls. It is particularly effective for calls transmitted over VoIP and is increasingly mandated by regulators.
Q: What should businesses do if their numbers are spoofed?
Businesses should report the incident to telecom providers and engage law enforcement if necessary. To prevent future attacks, businesses should adopt effective spoofing protection like SecureLogix® Orchestra One™.