Long-Distance Crooks
Run Up $2K Phone Bill
By Sandy Vondrasek

While the employees of Advanced Illuminations were enjoying a recent weekend off, crooks were industriously working the phone lines in the Rochester company’s Route 100 headquarters.

The result was $2000 worth of long-distance calls to everywhere from Iraq to Cuba to Eritrea in Africa—all racked up between a Friday night and a Monday morning.

According to company CEO Bill Thrailkill, the unknown hackers evidently tapped into Advanced Illumination’s phone lines via the voice mail system. Thrailkill said he was drawing attention to the scam in order to alert others to the problem.

The company—like many other businesses with complex phone networks—had opted to use four-digit passwords to access voice mail, and most employees opted for easy-to-remember ones.

It turns out that four-digit, sequential passwords, such as 1-2-3-4, "are bad, bad, bad, bad," said company accounts manager Diane White this week.

Advanced Illuminations learned the hard way that a computer, working at the behest of a scam artist, can generate and try out hundreds of four-digit passwords in seconds. The programmed computer picks off the simplest ones first, White was told.

White said there were hundreds of calls to dozens of countries, including a 17-minute one to Cuba that came with a $217 tab.

One of the company’s providers, Verizon, alerted Advanced Illuminations to the problem early that Monday. The phone company had sent two emails earlier in the weekend, but of course, no one was at work to read them.

White also promptly contacted AI’s other providers, Sovernet and AT&T. "Blocks" were slapped on all lines, and the calls were stopped.

White said most of the $2000 in calls went through the Sovernet line. Verizon, now FairPoint, has "forgiven" its portion of the bill for fraudulent calls, she added, and AI is talking with its other providers.

Oh, and you can bet that Advanced Illuminations now has a new rule: random, six-code digits are mandatory for all of its voicemail passwords.

A computer could tackle that one, too, but it would take a bit longer. There are 10,000 possible variations with four digits, and one million with six.