Back in April our phone system at work was hacked and used to make a few hours worth of calls to Iran. This happened because of weak extension passwords. We have since audited all extensions and verified strong passwords are in use. I’m not sure about all phone systems, but ours allows you to call into it, enter your extension and password, and then get an outside line to dial back out on. So that’s obviously the feature the hackers are interested in.
Well, over the last two weeks we’ve noticed an increase in attempts again. All our lines have caller ID on them and when we come in the morning, we review the call logs and notice a lot of ‘Out of area’ calls at around 2 in the morning.
Yesterday was the icing on the cake though. One of the ‘hackers’ called in to and said they were from our phone system manufacturer support and needed our systems main password so they could run some tests. Needless to say, the information was not given to him. Also expressed, was a little anger in his direction.
We contacted our phone system makers and let them know what was going on so they can hopefully send a reminder to all their customers to never give out passwords and that their support people will never ask for them.
We’ve also called our phone/long distance provider and put a block on international calling and on the 10-10 services, which will bypass international blocks and still get charged to you.
So, if your phone system allows for called in people to get an outside line, be sure your using strong extension passwords.