[616c]

I do not offer to buy things often from stuff posted on HN.

PLEASE WRITE A BOOK. I would most definitely buy your anecdotes, and even more for anecdotes that motivated this advice to pass of to people.

Also, how did you get into the line of work you are in?

[jdee]

Joined a startup as CTO/investor at an IVR company. Built up 4 years domain knowledge working with telephony fraud. exited a month ago as part of a $150m sale.

Final anecdote. A certain attack requires the fraudster to call the target's bank and ask a few questions. For some reason in ALL of these calls there is the sound of a baby crying in the background.

Our theory is that while testing the attack vector, the first time it 'worked' a baby must have been crying. The fraudsters think it works as some kind of high frequency disruption to confuse any biometric systems that are processing the call, so they play a RECORDING of a baby in the background of all subsequent calls.

It reminds me of learned behaviour in animals. The pigeon stands on one leg and gets a treat. The pigeon now thinks the one legged approach is what makes the treat appear.

The icing on the cake was when I got a call from a bank asking if there are any biometric systems that can detect the sound of crying babies...

[ballard]

I was joking. :) But that is funny.

"To paraphrase Felix Dennis, 'It is like watching a millionaire point his finger at the sky, then running out to write books with titles like `How to Become A Millionaire by Pointing at the Sky`, when all along the millionaire was just trying to show people the glory of the sunset."

http://www.kiasuparents.com/kiasu/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2264...