Billions have been spent on attacking global terrorism since the September, 11 2001 attacks including the military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. While the current efforts to track down terrorists who tote weapons of mass destruction and are responsible for nefarious deeds are certainly valid, a new attack has been waged on the U.S. and the enemies are winning.

What I’m talking about here, is Internet fraud and phishing attacks, a problem that has been largely ignored by the resource strapped U.S. government. It’s a problem that looks like a bunch of random thugs out to bilk money and steal the identities of unsuspecting Internet users. In reality it’s a coordinated foreign effort to bankrupt America.

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A little known telecommunications industry secret has been exposed in a big way. Just like email… telephone caller ID relies on the origination source to identify itself. Yes, The number that shows up on your caller ID isn’t the gospel truth - it could be a complete fake or a misrepresentation and that fact has a huge impact on court cases where caller ID data is used to prove stalking, harassment, and proof of consorting with drug dealers and other known criminals.

Who let the cat out of the bag? It all started innocently enough with the release to the open source Asterisk Voice over IP (VoIP) PBX software for Linux based operating systems. Asterisk is the powerful backbone to many popular VOIP solutions. Asterisk has a feature which allows the custom configuration of the phone number which is displayed on Caller ID. After all the caller ID is transmitted from the origination phone system so why not make that a customizable feature? This helps companies who have many outgoing phone lines display one unified number in which callers can return a phone call. Then along came a company called Spoof Card which uses this technology in an interesting way. Spoof Card allows a user to call a phone number (virtual calling card) and then input the phone number they wish to call and also input the phone number they wish to have appear on the caller ID, the call then connects.

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Tools like the Firefox add-on “Ad block plus” and even mainstream security products like McAffe Security Suite are causing major headaches for popular Internet websites which rely on advertising as a sole source of revenue. Some say greedy webmasters who riddle their sites with 10, 20, and sometimes even more ads per page are the blame for the widespread backlash. The worst offenders make you view full page ads before proceeding or use pop-ups or pop-unders.

The popularly of websites who are taking the “moral high ground” like craiglist and wikipedia are also causing headaches because they provide a quality alternative to other popular websites which have large amounts of ads. Will this soon bankrupt the major players or will they reinvent themselves?

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