The rebirth of phreaking

✍ Scribed by Steve Gold

• Book ID: 104392956
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 185 KB
• Volume: 2011
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1353-4858
• DOI: 10.1016/s1353-4858(11)70064-2

✦ Synopsis

The rebirth of phreaking

Phreakers of that era used a variety of techniques to make free phone calls, typically by generating in-band audio signals to fool the destination dialled that the call was not originated by a humble user of the phone network, allowing the call to be routed via non-standard means.

Fast forward to 2011 and the telephone network has changed significantly. In place of in-band audio signals, we have packet-switched network routed TCP/IP packets -along with their authenticated control information -via digital circuits. But while it's no longer widely possible to generate a phreaked call from an origin point on the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), it is still possible to generate a nonstandard call by inserting a voice call from outside the PSTN, typically using a Voice over IP (VoIP) or cellular-originated system. Both these systems canand frequently are -subverted using the Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency (DTMF) signalling system that phone phreakers used in the analogue days of the 1970s and 1980s.