In an exclusive interview with Telecom Review leading up to the 18th edition of the Telecom Review Leaders’ Summit, Sergey Okhrimenko, Chief Technology Officer at AB Handshake, elaborated on the company’s cutting-edge solutions, which are addressing global telecommunications fraud and leveraging AI to reinforce the telecom industry’s cybersecurity sector.
What cutting-edge solutions are currently underway to address global telecommunications fraud?
Fraud is an international phenomenon happening everywhere, with fraudsters operating mostly abroad. The most promising fraud mitigation tool should be based on the real-time cooperation of service providers at both national and international levels.
AB Handshake comes from a patented technology that verifies caller IDs and all call events using end-to-end, real-time validation between the ‘A’ and ‘B’ parties—like a handshake.
When we implement this at a national level, it effectively stops scams, spam, impersonation, and fraud. Currently, we are building an international call validation community and more operators are benefiting from the technology. We are also using an AI behavioral analysis engine to protect destinations that are not yet covered by the call validation framework.
With artificial intelligence dominating the industry, how does AB Handshake leverage AI to enhance its anti-fraud solutions?
Currently, we are offering a real-time fraud management tool that includes call validation technology and an AI-based behavioral analysis engine. We started building our AI tool early in 2013 when we realized that traditional threshold-based rules were not effective against most types of fraud. Since then, we have been training our AI management tool on vast amounts of international and national traffic.
Now, we have a mature AI engine that takes into account more than 150 voice traffic parameters, detecting various types of fraud such as Wangiri, spam, scams, and false answer supervision, with very high accuracy, a low false-positive rate, and without harming operators’ revenue. We are able to do this because we do not block numbers or number ranges; we block just fraudulent calls, which is our main differentiator from other systems on the market.
How does AB Handshake utilize innovative technologies to reinforce the telecom industry’s cybersecurity sector?
We have two innovative technologies that utilize AI to a great extent. Beyond this, it is important to remember why we have invested in these technologies. There are three main pillars or goals we want to achieve through our technologies.
The first is that we wanted to take real-time action, with our solutions integrated into the network on a signaling level. Second, we focus on accuracy within our validation and AI-based fraud management tools, which block fraudulent calls while ensuring the maximum amount of legitimate traffic. Lastly, AI is proving to be extremely effective against a broad range of fraud; however, CLI spoofing is still difficult to detect end-to-end, in real time, significantly impacting subscribers’ and operators’ revenues. We want to make our call validation technology the standard across the industry.
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