While we are talking about cybersecurity and hacking, it is also worth noting that most of this is also deception in some form or the other. For example, some hacking attacks would involve sending you a fake link or an email and telling you to click on something but it is a spam link which takes all your details when you click on it. On the other hand, it is also possible that you are involved in something else which is also a scam such as a honeytrap. This is basically a trap to attract men by luring them to women and getting information and then blackmailing them to get money or else out their secrets.
This type of honeypot tactic is used inside the army as well to get state secrets and we know this happens right now too. Similarly, researchers found a new honeypot which uses a simple telephony method to scam people. The research that also won an award at the USENIX conference, “North Carolina State University presented a list of findings from operating a massive telephony honeypot for 11 months for the sole purpose of tracking, identifying, and analyzing the robocalling phenomenon in the US”.
In the research, it was revealed that the NCSU “ran 66,606 telephone lines between March 2019 and January 2020, during which time they said to have received 1,481,201 unsolicited calls — even if they never made their phone numbers public via any source”. This means that the numbers were either sold by the telecom operators or they found from some other source.
Researchers also mentioned that not every call during the surge was a robocall saying that some came from real person too. However, they believe a technique called “caller ID spoofing” was used which is to hide the robocall and instead show it as a real person.
