Overview

Omni Shield is 8x8's solution to protect enterprises and their customers from fraudulent SMS activities, such as toll or international revenue share fraud.

The Omni Shield solution offers comprehensive monitoring, real-time traffic analysis, and automatic detection and cancellation of messages from known fraudulent numbers.

Its benefits include reducing Artificial Inflation of Traffic (AIT) attacks, decreasing monthly messaging expenses, and providing real-time alerts and automatic detection of potential fraud.

How Omni Shield Works?

Omni Shield Consists of two primary components:

• Traffic Anomaly Detector: Analyse live traffic on abnormal trends using machine learning
• Phone Number Intelligence (Launching Soon): Verify that a number is valid and responsive before sending an SMS

The diagram below adds more context into how Omni Shield fits within the context of sending SMS traffic:

Recommendations To Mitigate SMS Fraud Attacks

While Omni Shield can help prevent fraud attacks, we believe in a shared responsibility model between 8x8 and you as a customer.

Please see the following page for recommendations that should be implemented on your end to mitigate fraud attacks.

Glossary

Operator Share: A metric based on the known distribution of mobile subscribers across different carriers within a country. Each mobile operator typically maintains a relatively stable percentage of the total mobile market in their country. For example, if an operator normally handles 30% of a country's mobile traffic but suddenly accounts for 60% of your application's traffic, this deviation from the expected operator share may indicate an AIT attack.

Country Share: The distribution of your SMS traffic across different countries, which typically follows consistent patterns based on your user base and business operations. Unless you've recently expanded into new markets, significant changes in the proportion of traffic from a specific country can signal potential AIT attacks, as fraudsters often target one geographic region at a time.

Volume Spike: An anomalous increase in SMS traffic to a specific mobile operator compared to typical patterns for that day and time of week. These spikes are analyzed in context of historical traffic patterns, taking into account normal variations due to time of day, day of week, and seasonal factors.

Conversion Rate: The percentage of sent OTP (One-Time Password) messages that are successfully verified by users. A typical legitimate user flow involves requesting an OTP and then entering it to verify their identity. During AIT attacks, fraudsters often trigger large volumes of OTP messages without completing the verification step, resulting in an unusually low conversion rate compared to normal user behavior. This metric serves as a key indicator of potential fraudulent activity.

PNI (Phone Number Intelligence): 8x8 collects OTP Conversion history of a number and also checks to see if the number is flagged as suspicious by 3rd party.

Managing Traffic Suspensions

When Omni Shield detects suspicious patterns indicating an AIT attack targeting a specific operator, you can temporarily suspend message delivery to prevent further fraudulent activity. This immediate response helps protect against mounting costs while minimizing disruption to legitimate users.

Key Suspension Guidelines:

• Every suspension executed from 8x8 Connect has a defined expiration period to prevent accidental permanent traffic blocks
• Work with our service team to analyze patterns, identify fraud sources, and develop preventive measures
• Before lifting a suspension, verify the fraud source has been removed and traffic patterns have normalized
• Remove the suspension promptly once resolved to restore service to legitimate users

FAQ