Secure Signals International (SSI), a risk management firm for the cable TV industry, and Genesys Solutions Inc., a system integration and software development company, have teamed up for a digital set-top box non-responder management solution for cable operators.

The solution, SSI Guard Dog, manages the work flow generated by non-responding digital set-tops and helps to identify fraudulent consumer activity, such as attached filters or devices that render digital STBs unresponsive to headend billing systems. If a PPV request comes in, for example, and the request does not reach the billing system, a non-responder report is created.

“There’s not a cable operator out there that knows exactly what’s going on with their non-responders,” said Stan McGinnis, founder and CEO of SSI. And if non-responders account for more than six percent of an operator’s customer base, it’s a problem, McGinnis said.

SSI creates a VPN within the cable company and dumps non-responder reports and other data as frequently as the operator desires. When the data is dumped, it is then offline, and therefore not affecting anything online.

Cable piracy is defined as the unauthorized interception, receipt or assistance in intercepting or receiving services. Fraud, on the other hand, occurs when someone knowingly lies to obtain benefit or advantage, or to cause some benefit that is due to be denied.
  
“Fraud is possible, and often prevalent, across all network technologies," said Ganesh Hegde, founder and CEO of Genesys. “With telecommunications fraud having tripled over the past six years, emerging service providers and relatively new technologies are particularly vulnerable.”

About $56 billion is lost each year due to fraud in the telecom industry. Telephony is still a young service in the cable world, and fraudsters tend to migrate to the system that’s least monitored or least experienced.

SSI Guard Dog is currently being beta tested on several U.S. cable systems.
 
In June, SSI and NeuStar Inc. joined forces for a risk management program. NeuStar’s clearinghouse solution allowed SSI, for the first time, to offer cable operators a broadband loss prevention management solution.