[VoiceOps] Strange calling patterns

[Ryan Delgrosso]

All,
So I know with the election tomorrow all bets are basically off for 
weird calling patterns but I have seen some really strange stuff today 
and was hoping someone else might have seen it as well or be able to 
validate some theories.

I had a number in a Michigan exchange receive 99,000 inbound calls in a 
single hour (no that is actually ninety nine thousand) and that user had 
their number forwarded off to another overloaded Michigan exchange so it 
generated nearly a million outbound call attempts as my system attempted 
to find an open trunk to get through. Earlier I had a similar case with 
a Florida exchange where a single user received 150,000 calls in an hour 
all with invalid source numbers, and all arrived through otherwise 
reputable origination carriers (L3, Paetec etc).

The commonality here is that in both cases the customer account had no 
registered device and had forwarding setup, and the destination for both 
was an overloaded exchange in a swing state. In all cases I have 
suspended the accounts and stopped the traffic but it still doesn't give 
me the warm and fuzzies.

My first inclination is this feels like some kind of DDOS to hurt 
polling or last minute campaigning since if the attempts were legitimate 
they wouldn't be winning supporters by calling them 150,000 times but im 
really open to ideas here.


Anyone out there with some experience or theories, feel free to chime in 
or reply off list if paranoid.

-Ryan