A leading European pharmaceutical company was the victim of a global premium rate fax-back scam, which defrauded it of over $250K over a single weekend, and exposed just how easily any company can fall victim to a telephone-based hack attack or fraud activity. The fax-back scheme involved use of a premium rate phone line set at $75 a minute. Siemens Communications was called in to investigate the incident, and was able to put preventative measures in place to stop the fraud from reoccurring.

By successfully hacking the target company, the hacker was able to use phones, modems and fax machines within the business to call the premium rate number, running up bills on the target company's telephony service, while profits accumulated on the fax-back line.

Siemens Communications, an arm of Siemens was called in as PBX security experts once the fraud was discovered.

After performing a survey of the security vulnerabilities on the network, Siemens took preventative measures and installed hardware and software security appliances on the network to stop a repeat attack. It also instigated a programme of staff training to ensure that security policy was understood by users.