AS IF unsolicited sales calls weren鈥檛 bad enough, now you can be subjected to spit too, or 鈥渟pam over internet telephony鈥� messages. To make matters worse, current deterrents may be useless.
Spit is particularly annoying because a call is more intrusive than a spam email. What鈥檚 more, spam filters don鈥檛 block spit since the content of a call is only known once it has been made. Existing efforts to block spit range from tests to ensure the caller is human, to analysis of users鈥� internet traffic.
But these efforts are ineffective, says a team from the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology in Darmstadt, Germany. At a security conference next month in Johannesburg, South Africa, they will demonstrate software that can bypass current anti-spit measures and could be used to test future methods.
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