Key Takeaways:
- According to Canada’s telecommunications regulator, telecom providers must adopt new technologies to protect Canadians against spoof and fraudulent phone calls.
- Secure Telephony Information Revisited, or STIR, is a technical standard that allows carriers to authenticate callers’ identities.
CRTC chair Ian Scott said on Monday at the Canadian Telecom Summit in Toronto that telecom companies have until November 30 to update their networks to satisfy a technological standard that allows providers to confirm a caller’s identity.
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Unwanted calls, often known as robocalls, have become such a widespread issue, as per Scott, that they are contributing toward an “erosion of trust in the telecommunications system.”
“Somewhere in the order of 25%, if not more than 25%, of all calls made on phone networks are robocalls,” Scott said in a conversation following his speech. “It’s a big challenge that will necessitate tremendous effort from regulators and cooperation from the industry to address.”
The CRTC approved the formation of the Canadian Secure Token-Governance Authority Inc. in 2019, an industry group whose role is to encourage industry full adoption of protocols, policies, also operating procedures to reduce spoofing and illegal robocalling.
The other component, known as “Shaken,” stands for “signature-based handling of asserted knowledge using tokens” also refers to the framework for realizing the standard in the networks of IP-based service providers.
While the sole requirement for Canadian carriers is to update their networks to allow the technology to be raised by the end of the month, Scott noted that the objective is to offer Canadians the opportunity to select which calls are real and worth answering and which should be avoided.
Finally, Scott stated that call recipients would get a caller ID with a “red light” or “green light” beside the name, indicating if the carrier has validated the caller’s identity.
Other carriers should think about how they might better safeguard their subscribers from annoying and potentially destructive activity on their networks, Scott said, noting that criminals frequently use robocalls to defraud hardworking people out of their money and sensitive information.
Source: CP24
