How one guy with a 20yo telephone did $30m in damages in less than one night.

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7vvti/what_on_gods_green_earth_gets_a_fucking_pl7/c07k5nn

by joshwa • 17 years ago

67 27 17 years ago

jrockway5• 17 years ago

I think this is a "straw that broke the camel's back" type of thing. Three guys getting some extra phone calls on one night will cost your company 80 million dollars? That means there is something seriously wrong with your business.

80 million dollars buys a lot of custom software to automate this sort of thing.

biohacker42• 17 years ago

What this guys said: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7vvti/what_on_g...

jrockway5• 17 years ago

Yeah.

I refuse to comment on Reddit, though, so I rehashed it over here.

smanek• 17 years ago

There's definitely something missing from that story ...

How did the 'attacker' just happen to have a wardialer and know to use it that night? Why couldn't the NOC just shut off that one guy's service? Why can't I find any reference to this in the news? (they always love a good cracker story). How was a company that big operating in such an ad-hoc manner?

tlb• 17 years ago

I think a more likely theory is that the telecom providers frequently jack their rates, to see if people notice. If someone doesn't notice, they keep jacking them and rake in profits. It's a good bet that at least one NOC is asleep at the switch on a given night.

gurtwo• 17 years ago

I find hard to believe that during such a special night all the company's fate depended on 3 guys with no backup and no direct supervision. If that's true, it seems to me very unprofessional.

pavel_lishin3• 17 years ago

After reading The Daily WTF (and assuming those stories are at least 80% truth), these sorts of tales don't really surprise me.

eli3• 17 years ago

I find it totally believable. Really, really stupid, but believable.

This is some off-brand calling card company, not Verizon.

jobeirne• 17 years ago

The wonderful thing about this story is that if it had happened a month ago, odds are that we'd be hearing about a pending bailout.

rglullis• 17 years ago

Given it is 2001 and not so much broadband adoption, I'd find it easier to believe if it was some script-kiddie who found a way to play with a modem and DTMF signal generation.

Also, as already pointed out, this does not seem to be a big company at all. In a world where even a idiot can start a company, you will eventually end up with companies run by idiots.

nebula• 17 years ago

"In a world where even a idiot can start a company, you will eventually end up with companies run by idiots."

Given that market forces determine which companies survive, if we eventually end up with companies run by idiots, it tells something about the rest of us too.

jakewolf• 17 years ago

I know a stupid idiot who bought some equipment, illegally stuck it in some country and is reselling minutes through someone and making money somewhere along the way. Some screw up and he could be in the same boat. But you'd think companies would limit the credit they extend to others...something isn't quite right with that story.

eli3• 17 years ago

Could well have been a competitor (as others have suggested), or perhaps a severely malfunctioning phone. (It's not unheard of; there was a series of 911 hangup calls around where I used to work that was eventually traced to a vending machine modem).

Why wasn't it in the news? Well, because nobody ever told them. It's not like you'd issue a press release.

And why were they running such a cheap operation? Because they were stupid and greedy.

(Not saying the story is 100% true, but it's certainly plausible)

brianobush• 17 years ago

possibly an inside job? or by a competitor or contract channel (quest, etc.)

ShabbyDoo• 17 years ago

I liken this story to the mortgage-backed securities mess/scandal/disaster. Read http://semyondukach.blogspot.com/2009/01/real-cause-of-finan... -- a link previously posted here on HN.

99.99% of the nights, this company could get by without a few $M of software to automate these processes and protect it from extreme risks. However, it couldn't survive even a single night of failure. It's like a player in an online poker tournament who makes extreme and unnecessary all-in bets to steal pots: The strategy works really well until the last time you try it.

I wonder if management/investors were really aware of the risk profile they had implicitly accepted.

dhimes• 17 years ago

I can't read any more. My bs detector is whistling way too loudly...

TimBowen• 17 years ago

This is a really interesting story even if it is embellished or flat out false, good read.

rmason• 17 years ago

I ran the story by a local telco guy tonight who said the guy has the lingo right but its bogus. He told me that two guys couldn't run a NOC with that equipment for that level of calls.

He also mentioned there were some other technical errors in the story like the fact MySQL was not used at all in the industry at that time and he doubted PHP was either.

He said make it $800,000 lost in one night instead of $80,000,000 and it might be a stretch but be believable.

petercooper• 17 years ago

The Sunday before thanksgiving is the biggest day of the year for people using call cards? Not saying it's a lie but that sounds weird to me.

I'd have guessed New Years Eve/Day, Christmas Eve or something like that.. or perhaps even the first day of the work year or whatever.

How one guy with a 20yo telephone did $30m in damages in less than one night.

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