$45,582 telephone bill: Furniture company's security breach traced back to Somalia

By: Richard Gould | Hickory Daily Record
Published: March 18, 2010

It only took 12 hours for a hacker to run up $45,582 in telephone charges for a local furniture company.

More than 10,000 minutes of phone calls were made from the phones at Sherrill Furniture on Highland Ave. NE from 9 p.m. on Friday, March 5 to 9 a.m. the following day.

The company reported the security breach to police Tuesday and the preliminary investigation revealed that the phone calls originated in Somalia.

Investigators know that calls were made to Austria, Bulgaria, France, Korea, and the Philippines.

"We're not sure why the calls were made," said Capt. Thurman Whisnant of the Hickory Police Department.

The owner of a local computer data security company thinks he knows why the phones were hacked.

"It sounds like the goal was to re-sell the phone time for cash," said Luke Walling of Walling Data Corporation.

He said teams of people work on the streets of common tourist destinations selling phone time at deeply discounted rates on pay phones or cell phones while hackers are in the background working to exploit corporate phone systems.

The teams of hackers and salesmen are well organized and Walling suspects they sold the more than 10,000 minutes of phone calls in real time.

The thieves target corporate phone systems because they tend to be the weak link in a lot of companies' security systems.

"This is a pretty common scam," Walling said. "What makes it different from standard types of identity theft is that most businesses aren't very quick to jump out and talk about it."

Whisnant said investigators are working with federal agencies to try to get to the bottom of the crime but admits working on fraud cases that cross international boundaries is not easy.

"We're going to explore all options. If anything can be done we're going to do it," Whisnant said. "We work with federal agencies daily on cases like this, but it's still tough."

Sherrill's phone company, Century Link, is working with the company to resolve the problem, according to the police report.