SPITting mad: Qovia stopping voice mail Spam in its tracks

Telecommunications Americas, June, 2004 by Jim Barthold

They're calling it SPIT--Spam over Internet Telephony--in the Qovia labs in Frederick, Md. They're also equating it to the Ebola virus and guarding it closely, hoping to keep it contained in those labs.

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For those using or about to use IP as a voice transport, the potential for disaster looms with about as much impact as a deadly virus. Automatically generated spam could, Qovia lab technicians have determined, shut down VoIP as telemarketers use the network's computer characteristics to deliver one-to-many messages that used to require one person--or one voice-generating machine--and one phone.

"VoIP now gives the capability to have one message go out across the "cloud" to a lot of voice mailboxes at the same time," said Pierce Reid, Qovia's marketing vice president.

It would be, Reid figured, the next generation in telemarketing that started with phone calls, moved to faxes and slid naturally into e-mail. Because the potential spam is running over IP voice networks, it's not covered by the national "do-not-call" list, and because it's not strictly data, it's not covered by "do not spam." It has the potential to be a telemarketer's dream and a VoIP user's nightmare.

Choon Shim, Qovia's CTO, set his engineers to work first to see if this threat was real--and to see how quickly it could be created--and then to create a "vaccine" to stop it before it starts. It didn't take much time--about two hours, Shim estimated--to create a program that generated VoIP spam and knocked out a call manager in the Qovia labs capable of handling 100,000 phones.

"Think about shutting down the entire system and filling up the voice mail and the system stops functioning," said Shim. "That really happened."

Once Qovia's techs determined it could happen, they set to work stopping it. The company, which does VoIP network monitoring and management, and some pre-deployment testing, is now developing and patenting algorithms that it would not further detail, to include with its software by the end of this year.

Meanwhile, the lab has the program under close watch. "We're guarding that spam generator like they're guarding the Ebola virus in the CDC so it's not escaping and getting into telemarketers' hands," said Shim. "It's a really dangerous thing."

It is, emphasized Reid, more than a potential annoyance that will accompany a new technology. "E-mail spam is a first-class annoyance, but VoIP spam is more than that; it actually explodes your system and makes it unavailable by filling up your voice mail. It could be really destructive," he said.

The Qovia execs, though, think they've caught it in time and should have preventive measures in place by year-end at the latest to protect what promises to be a huge market for IP-generated voice. "It's nice when the white hats realize there's something going to happen before the black hats get moving on it," Pierce said.