Lee Sutterfield Talks Robocalls on NPR's "Here & Now"

SecureLogix CEO Lee Sutterfield appeared on a recent episode of NPR's "Here & Now" to discuss the increasingly complicated challenge of defeating robocalls.

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Why Robocalls Are Such a Hard Problem

If it feels like your phone rings more than it used to, you're not imagining it. Americans were hit with over 58 billion robocalls in 2019, roughly 4.87 billion every month, a 22% jump from the year before. That's thousands of calls placed every second, day and night.

Not all of these calls are the same. Some are annoying but harmless. Many are outright scams designed to steal money, identities, and information. In fact, nearly half of the robocalls Americans received were expected to be scams. And robocalls are only one item on a long list of voice threats that also includes spoofing, impersonation, toll fraud, call pumping, social engineering, and telephony denial-of-service (TDoS) attacks.

So why is this such a stubborn problem? Because the phone network was never built with security in mind. As Sutterfield often points out, enterprises have spent enormous sums protecting email and data networks, while voice systems were left largely unprotected. Fraudsters noticed, and they now target enterprise phone systems with the same kinds of attacks once reserved for data networks.

What About STIR/SHAKEN?

You may have heard that the phone industry has a fix in the works. STIR/SHAKEN is a set of standards designed to verify that a call really comes from the number it claims to, using digital certificates to confirm that a caller ID is legitimate. The FCC has urged carriers to adopt it, and the TRACED Act directs the FCC to require implementation by mid-2021.

That's promising. But it isn't a complete answer on its own. STIR/SHAKEN tells you something about where a call originated, yet it doesn't decide whether a call is actually trustworthy, and it doesn't stop a determined attacker from finding new ways through. Robocallers adapt quickly. That's the theme Sutterfield returns to again and again: defeating robocalls is a moving target, and it takes layered, intelligent defenses rather than a single silver bullet.

How SecureLogix Helps Fight Robocalls

SecureLogix has spent more than two decades doing exactly this work. Its research team has profiled attacks, tracked threats, and built technology to protect some of the world's largest and most complex voice networks, including work funded through joint research partnerships with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Department of Defense.

Here's how that translates into practical protection against robocalls.

The Call Defense™ Call Security System

At the center of SecureLogix's inbound defense is the Call Defense™ Call Security System. It's proprietary technology that sits at the edge of your voice network and sorts good traffic from bad in real time, so unwanted calls are reduced before they ever reach your agents or employees.

Key components include:

  • Voice firewall that blocks bad calls before they reach your network.
  • Voice intrusion prevention system (IPS) that detects call-pattern attacks and anomalies, the kind of behavior you see in a robocall flood or a TDoS attack.
  • Red List™ Caller Profile Database, a proprietary international database of harassing callers and call-attack signatures built on two decades of voice network protection data.
  • Reporting and forensics that give you enterprise-wide visibility into voice traffic and every attack.

The system is vendor and protocol agnostic. It protects SIP, TDM, or hybrid networks, complements your existing session border controllers, and supports customers' diverse networks and operations.

The Call Secure™ Managed Call Security Service

Not every organization wants to run its own voice security operation. The Call Secure™ Managed Call Security Service delivers the power of the Call Defense™ system as a fully managed, 24/7 service, backed by what SecureLogix calls the most experienced call security service team in the business.

That team professionally builds and enforces your voice security policy, monitors for new attacks, and blocks or redirects malicious calls, with regular reporting all the way up to the executive level. When a robocall campaign or TDoS attack hits, you have experienced people on your side to respond, not just a dashboard.

The Takeaway

Robocalls are a hard problem, but they are a solvable one. As Lee Sutterfield's conversation on "Here & Now" makes clear, no single regulation or standard will make the calls stop overnight. What works is layered defense: filtering bad traffic at the edge of the network, drawing on decades of attack intelligence, and having experienced people ready to respond when attackers change tactics.

That's the approach SecureLogix has built its business around, protecting the voice networks of some of the most demanding organizations in the world, from major banks to government agencies.

Wondering how many robocalls are slipping into your voice network right now? Speak with a Voice Security Expert and find out.