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It's really all of them - If your doing a job that involves either customer care, or resolving call based issues, you have the ability to: See call detail recor

by Aloha 13y ago

It's really all of them - If your doing a job that involves either customer care, or resolving call based issues, you have the ability to: See call detail records, sometimes capture voice calls to and from that subscriber, capture signalling data in realtime, track a mobile user in call thru the system for the purposes of finding defective network elements. There is a good reason why we had these abilities, they were essential to resolve and troubleshoot user reported issues. For example, if a customer reported troubles or call quality issues calling 202-555-1212, I needed to be able to pull their CDR's so I could determine which outbound trunk group the call went out on, so I could report it to that carrier to see if they could resolve.

modeless 13y ago
> There is a good reason why we had these abilities Bullshit. Systems can be designed to allow troubleshooting and problem resolution without giving broad access to user data. Telecoms are just too lazy to do it. They have local monopolies, so they just don't need to care.
- MichaelGG 13y ago
  I've written tools for VoIP companies for diagnostics. The most helpful system is one that logs everything and has it available on-demand. The one I wrote literally recorded and indexed every call-related packet (except audio) and records were kept indefinitely. This is network-level traffic. It reduced time-to-resolution by at least an order of magnitude, since a ticket to the effect of "this weekend someone at the office called someone in Germany and it didnt work" could find out exactly what happened. Apart from that, call detail records (CDRs) are available to many people in a telecom. And it doesn't matter if you trust your telco, because they probably hand off traffic to others in many cases. Even large companies like AT&T deal with very scummy third-parties to get the cheapest prices to place calls. (I know that first hand, because sometimes people sell call capacity they don't have. Instead of completing the call, they answer and play a fake recording of someone saying "wait a sec". Once, when dialing from my AT&T cell, I got the same exact recording I had PCAP'd from some third-rate provider.) Unlike email, where you don't need to provide access to email records in most cases, CDRs are needed for all aspects of billing. While your complete profile may be relatively safe in a large company with internal controls, depending on your calling patterns, you may very well be leaking a lot of details to many third parties you've never heard of. Edit: You could theoretically add all sorts of controls and access-limitations. There's really zero benefit to doing so. Plenty of companies still rely on techs being able to run tcpdump on a mirror port or server in question.
  - Aloha 13y ago
    Pretty much exactly my point of view. We had the problem with low cost carriers too - though it was usually a quality issue, some customers because of the nature of their business (e.g. lots of fax calling) we would push them on to generally high cost TDM trunks via the local LEC versus lower costs VoIP trunks with level3 or other carriers. I wish I could convey to people that they need to trust that their carrier is not just sharing their info beyond what is required to make the network work and what is legally required of them by the federal/state/local government. I wish I could also explain more about how the telephone network, works. Like, how its virtually impossible to record every single call made in the US in a blanket sort of way, and that every transiting carrier from here to there also has a slice of their information.
  - modeless 13y ago
    > You could theoretically add all sorts of controls and access-limitations. There's really zero benefit to doing so. Wow. That, right there, is the problem. You don't have to care about other people's privacy, so you don't. You're not accountable, and neither are the companies you work for. I hope there's a disgruntled insider at one of the companies that uses your tools, and they vacuum up all the data they can find and leak it. Maybe a public scandal could make you care, if it affected your bottom line.
    - Aloha 13y ago
      Have you ever worked in a support role?
    - MichaelGG 13y ago
      Hah. I don't mean to be condescending, but the security in telecom is laughable. I've tested nearly a dozen systems and networks, and in every case never had to spend more than a day getting root. (I'm sure there are decently designed ones, but that's not the common case.) I had the CTO of one of the major switch vendors tell me that "buffer overflows aren't a problem, unless maybe the network is very fast". This is a company that markets an edge device with security being one of the main bullet points. Not to mention, I'm willing to bet in many datacenters, you could literally just walk in and take disks out of machines. If they've got RAID and no alarming on RAID (not too uncommon) no one will even notice. Sure, some places have solid cages or require escorts. But a lot of colo space is relatively unmonitored and so long you look like you belong there and get past perimeter security (as easy as renting 1U in the same place, often) you're totally in. And the sad part? To my knowledge, these attacks aren't that widespread. Why? Because there's even lower-hanging fruit that's more lucrative to hackers. Anyways, to your point: How would this access control work? How are you going to verify a CSR actually got a call from a specific customer? How much effort are you going to put in verifying that data? This is an industry where tons of money is charged and moved around based purely on emails received, with zero verification. Also remember that full wiretap capabilities are a federal requirement (CALEA). So somewhere, they'll have a system that can turn on lawful intercept. That avenue is probably ripe for abuse. You're right in your overall sentiment. The FCC and federal government should enact privacy laws and force companies to internalize this externality. Until they do, there's little reason to make it any more difficult for support to do their job.
- Aloha 13y ago
  So, a typical scenario. "I had an incoming call come in at 3pm, no, I dont know the number, and I couldn't hear them/poor quality audio, can you check and see what was wrong?" OR "Everyone who calls me from johnstown says I have a really bad echo" These require either the calling party or the called party, you need to be able to locate what network element they touched. At every company I had to sign a generic NDA to not disclose customer information without consent from the company. In the end though, you don't own this data, the company you contract with for service does - you'd need to change the contract with them to get control over it. Adding the restrictions you propose would just make things more complex, not better. In the end, someone you don't want to have access will still have access - you need to trust the company you do business with to have good policy restrictions to protect their data, and your privacy.
  - modeless 13y ago
    You're just illustrating my point. Telecom systems are currently designed without privacy in mind at all. It would be possible to design these systems such that privacy was respected, but telecoms just don't care. > you need to be able to locate what network element they touched That doesn't require or justify you having blanket access to call metadata as a customer service technician. Instead, in a reasonable system, users would grant limited access to account data on a case-by-case basis. For example, a user could use a website or app to report a recent call as bad quality, which would grant access to a technician for that call only so they could investigate. The number of people in the company with blanket access to all user data should be very, very low. Certainly nobody in customer service should have it.
    - Aloha 13y ago
      The telecoms legally own this data, its theirs, and its needed for all sorts of internal functions beyond just customer care - but lets focus on customer care: Without this access how would you: Create Trouble Tickets on call quality when the customer cant give very precise information? Give credits on miss dialed calls to overseas destinations? Explain charges on a customers bill? Open tickets on calls that cant complete - the example above "someone called Germany on Saturday, can you check and see why it didnt go thru?" I mean, I'd be interested on what form you think these access systems should take.

by Aloha 13y ago

modeless 13y ago

> There is a good reason why we had these abilities Bullshit. Systems can be designed to allow troubleshooting and problem resolution without giving broad access to user data. Telecoms are just too lazy to do it. They have local monopolies, so they just don't need to care.

MichaelGG 13y ago
I've written tools for VoIP companies for diagnostics. The most helpful system is one that logs everything and has it available on-demand. The one I wrote literally recorded and indexed every call-related packet (except audio) and records were kept indefinitely. This is network-level traffic. It reduced time-to-resolution by at least an order of magnitude, since a ticket to the effect of "this weekend someone at the office called someone in Germany and it didnt work" could find out exactly what happened. Apart from that, call detail records (CDRs) are available to many people in a telecom. And it doesn't matter if you trust your telco, because they probably hand off traffic to others in many cases. Even large companies like AT&T deal with very scummy third-parties to get the cheapest prices to place calls. (I know that first hand, because sometimes people sell call capacity they don't have. Instead of completing the call, they answer and play a fake recording of someone saying "wait a sec". Once, when dialing from my AT&T cell, I got the same exact recording I had PCAP'd from some third-rate provider.) Unlike email, where you don't need to provide access to email records in most cases, CDRs are needed for all aspects of billing. While your complete profile may be relatively safe in a large company with internal controls, depending on your calling patterns, you may very well be leaking a lot of details to many third parties you've never heard of. Edit: You could theoretically add all sorts of controls and access-limitations. There's really zero benefit to doing so. Plenty of companies still rely on techs being able to run tcpdump on a mirror port or server in question.
- Aloha 13y ago
  Pretty much exactly my point of view. We had the problem with low cost carriers too - though it was usually a quality issue, some customers because of the nature of their business (e.g. lots of fax calling) we would push them on to generally high cost TDM trunks via the local LEC versus lower costs VoIP trunks with level3 or other carriers. I wish I could convey to people that they need to trust that their carrier is not just sharing their info beyond what is required to make the network work and what is legally required of them by the federal/state/local government. I wish I could also explain more about how the telephone network, works. Like, how its virtually impossible to record every single call made in the US in a blanket sort of way, and that every transiting carrier from here to there also has a slice of their information.
- modeless 13y ago
  > You could theoretically add all sorts of controls and access-limitations. There's really zero benefit to doing so. Wow. That, right there, is the problem. You don't have to care about other people's privacy, so you don't. You're not accountable, and neither are the companies you work for. I hope there's a disgruntled insider at one of the companies that uses your tools, and they vacuum up all the data they can find and leak it. Maybe a public scandal could make you care, if it affected your bottom line.
  - Aloha 13y ago
    Have you ever worked in a support role?
  - MichaelGG 13y ago
    Hah. I don't mean to be condescending, but the security in telecom is laughable. I've tested nearly a dozen systems and networks, and in every case never had to spend more than a day getting root. (I'm sure there are decently designed ones, but that's not the common case.) I had the CTO of one of the major switch vendors tell me that "buffer overflows aren't a problem, unless maybe the network is very fast". This is a company that markets an edge device with security being one of the main bullet points. Not to mention, I'm willing to bet in many datacenters, you could literally just walk in and take disks out of machines. If they've got RAID and no alarming on RAID (not too uncommon) no one will even notice. Sure, some places have solid cages or require escorts. But a lot of colo space is relatively unmonitored and so long you look like you belong there and get past perimeter security (as easy as renting 1U in the same place, often) you're totally in. And the sad part? To my knowledge, these attacks aren't that widespread. Why? Because there's even lower-hanging fruit that's more lucrative to hackers. Anyways, to your point: How would this access control work? How are you going to verify a CSR actually got a call from a specific customer? How much effort are you going to put in verifying that data? This is an industry where tons of money is charged and moved around based purely on emails received, with zero verification. Also remember that full wiretap capabilities are a federal requirement (CALEA). So somewhere, they'll have a system that can turn on lawful intercept. That avenue is probably ripe for abuse. You're right in your overall sentiment. The FCC and federal government should enact privacy laws and force companies to internalize this externality. Until they do, there's little reason to make it any more difficult for support to do their job.
Aloha 13y ago
So, a typical scenario. "I had an incoming call come in at 3pm, no, I dont know the number, and I couldn't hear them/poor quality audio, can you check and see what was wrong?" OR "Everyone who calls me from johnstown says I have a really bad echo" These require either the calling party or the called party, you need to be able to locate what network element they touched. At every company I had to sign a generic NDA to not disclose customer information without consent from the company. In the end though, you don't own this data, the company you contract with for service does - you'd need to change the contract with them to get control over it. Adding the restrictions you propose would just make things more complex, not better. In the end, someone you don't want to have access will still have access - you need to trust the company you do business with to have good policy restrictions to protect their data, and your privacy.
- modeless 13y ago
  You're just illustrating my point. Telecom systems are currently designed without privacy in mind at all. It would be possible to design these systems such that privacy was respected, but telecoms just don't care. > you need to be able to locate what network element they touched That doesn't require or justify you having blanket access to call metadata as a customer service technician. Instead, in a reasonable system, users would grant limited access to account data on a case-by-case basis. For example, a user could use a website or app to report a recent call as bad quality, which would grant access to a technician for that call only so they could investigate. The number of people in the company with blanket access to all user data should be very, very low. Certainly nobody in customer service should have it.
  - Aloha 13y ago
    The telecoms legally own this data, its theirs, and its needed for all sorts of internal functions beyond just customer care - but lets focus on customer care: Without this access how would you: Create Trouble Tickets on call quality when the customer cant give very precise information? Give credits on miss dialed calls to overseas destinations? Explain charges on a customers bill? Open tickets on calls that cant complete - the example above "someone called Germany on Saturday, can you check and see why it didnt go thru?" I mean, I'd be interested on what form you think these access systems should take.