I accidentally logged hundreds of thousands of phone calls to military bases
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An expired domain purchase gave control of phone routing for three British territories, logging calls to military bases.
The author bought the expired domain `ns.enum.org.uk` for €5, which was a nameserver for three `e164.arpa` zones: +290 (Saint Helena), +246 (British Indian Ocean Territory/Diego Garcia), and +247 (Ascension Island). This allowed control of DNS responses for ENUM lookups, which map phone numbers to SIP/VoIP addresses. The system is mostly dead, but logging revealed ~400,000 queries, mostly for Diego Garcia and Ascension Island, with source IPs primarily American. The author reported the issue to the UK's NCSC after finding military base traffic, and eventually transferred the domain to them.
What commenters are saying
Commenters praised the story as reminiscent of classic hacking and phone phreaking. Several noted that ENUM is not completely dead, as telecom providers use it internally or via private networks for number porting and routing. Some speculated the logged queries were from misconfigured carrier systems leaking to public ENUM. The thread split on whether the author was lucky to avoid prosecution, with some citing her age and German nationality as factors. A discussion about Diego Garcia noted the base has no civilian subscribers, confirming the calls were military.