The bane of Australia's information and communications technology is Telstra.
A private company which is in charge of the Australian peoples communication infrastructure.
Why is it the "Australian peoples"?
Because the people payed for it (via their taxes), where it was unlawfully taken over by the private sector, but that is another matter for a dozen posts or so.
Telstra has stifled competition, by not allowing other companies to access the infrastructure already payed for by the Australian people.
An all too common 'problem' is that in 2017 in a 'new' suburb of a capital city, a household may not be able to get;
- the advertised internet speeds,
- internet from the competition, as Telstra has (deliberately) not allocated enough slots,
- any internet (landline) connection at all.
Telstra employs a 'low quality' migrant workforce which is based on a cheap (dollars per hour) cost rather than employing a (plentiful) skilled 'Australian' workforce.
Once the low quality workers stuff up the work, Telstra then gets another 'resource' to fix the problem, which comes at a cost to the customer. In effect work that did not need to be re-done if the correct resource was used in the first place.
Telstra has sacked many good workers only to replace them with cheap overseas outsourced labour, in questionable IT 'datacentres', with very low regards to privacy or customer data security.
At the end of the day, the shareholders, customers and 'mums and dads investors' pay for the incompetence of Telstra's management.
If you have been hacked as a result of Telstra's negligence we recommend you sue Telstra.
The results of these appalling business practices have been loosely touched on by the mainstream media in an article of the headline;
Mobile porting: Illegal hack 'happening more than we know'
One Telstra customer had her Telstra number stolen four time and the telco’s response was futile. Picture: Claudia Baxter
WHEN
Katie Fletcher had her mobile number stolen and ported to a different
carrier she knew it was bad news, but she didn’t necessarily expect it
would lead to her friends having thousands of dollars drained from their
bank accounts.
Ms Fletcher, 30, who works in Sydney and lives on
the central coast has had her Telstra number illegally ported an
astonishing four times in the past 18 months.
After stealing her
number, hackers were able to gain access to her e-mails and from there
collect personal details of her contacts and begin hacking their
accounts. She believes a huge number of her friend’s personal accounts
were hacked stemming from her number being ported.
“I stopped counting when I got to 33,” she told news.com.au.
Each
time her own bank account was compromised, Commonwealth Bank stopped
the offender from withdrawing money but some of her friends weren’t so
lucky and had up to “thirty or forty thousand dollars drained from their
accounts” which took months to get back, she said.
With telcos
failing to adequately defend against unauthorised porting, cyber
criminals are using the simple trick to steal people’s mobile numbers
and use it to burrow into their digital lives. Given that most important
accounts rely on two-factor authentication, which involves receiving a
text message code to log into the account, the momentary access can be
all they need to cause harm.
In most instances, fraudsters simply
need an account number for your mobile provider and your date of birth
to move the number across and begin wreaking havoc.
Dr Terry
Goldsworthy is a former detective inspector for the Queensland police
who now works as an assistant professor at Bond University. He began
researching the prevalence of illegal porting earlier this year but says
reliable data is almost non existent.
“No one seems to be collecting the data,” he told news.com.au. At least no one who is willing to share.
Last month he delivered a talk on the topic at the International
Conference on Cybercrime and Computer Forensics in which he made the
suggestion that there has been a regulatory failure in Australia when it
comes to dealing with the issue.
At the conference “I ran into a
police source and he said they’re getting hundreds of them (porting
complaints), mostly referred to them by the banks,” he said.
In
April the NSW police created a phone porting category for complaints
however if they do get reported to police or consumer bodies, most cases
typically get filed as instances of generic fraud.
“The actual offence numbers are getting diluted,” Dr Goldworthy said. “The problem is: who are we reporting to?
“I’m sure it’s happening more than we know.”
Terry Goldsworthy spent 28 years working for the Queensland police. Picture: Gosling RichardSource:News Limited
The issue
made headlines earlier in the year
when ABC journalist Tracey Holmes was the victim of unauthorised
porting. She believed someone likely got hold of her mail after she
moved house to get access to her Telstra account number and then managed
to find her date of birth online to carry out the attack.
In June
Telstra told news.com.au that it was “working to strengthen our
identification and verification procedures even further” because it
recognised the increased threat level because of the growing
“availability of individual’s personal information on social media and
other open platforms.” Telstra says it is continuing to do so, but
couldn’t provide any concrete examples.
The first time it happened
to Ms Fletcher was in March last year. Usually, it takes about a week
for victims to get their number back. It happened to her again a year
later and the third time her number was stolen, the hacker simply ported
the number to a new SIM card on a Telstra account.
At one point, a Telstra employee called the number and someone else picked up, Ms Fletcher said.
“By the fourth time they just wouldn’t help me, they (Telstra) were useless.”
Contrary
to what many disgruntled customers claim about the reality on the
ground, Telstra says its porting processes are identical for pre-paid
and post-paid services and comply with industry regulations.
But a
number of affected customers who spoke to news.com.au have called on
the telcos to ensure staff actually carry out the proper checks when
porting numbers to make sure the correct procedure is followed and the
number belongs to the person porting it.
“They all talk in
generics, but what are they actually gonna do?” Dr Goldworthy said of
industry assertions that it is addressing the problem.
In the case of Ms Fletcher, not much.
“Telstra’s advice was to just go somewhere else because we can’t stop it from happening,” she said.
Unsurprisingly, she has since switched carriers.
