[VOIPSEC] Cellphone Botnets, Blackmailing VOIP & a Healthy Cybercrime Economy - Desktop Security News Analysis - Dark Reading (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Dustin D. Trammell]

On Wed, 2008-10-22 at 10:30 +0100, nnp wrote:
> Has anyone here seen any examples of cellphone botnet'ing or hardphone
> botnet'ing for that matter? I'm interested to see how long it will be
> before (I can only assume someone is researching it) we see code
> execution + malware for the more common hardphones.

There's been a number of instances of cellphone trojans over the years,
a quick search on google turns up quite a few news references:

http://www.google.com/search?&q=cell+phone+trojan&btnG=Search

Why focus on cellular and hardphones though?  It's debatable whether or
not such devices have enough power to really do much as part of a
botnet, and if botnetting is your goal it would make much more sense for
an attacker to focus attacks on soft-phones instead; the end-result is a
much more powerful botnet member in that the botnet now has a user's
entire PC to work with rather than a underpowered device.  As
smart-phones get more and more powerful though such as the recent
devices from Apple (iPhone) and Google (G1) they will become more
attractive targets. 

> (Btw, does anyone know what OS those Cisco hardphones are running? I
> would assume it is something VxWorks/Linux based?)

Back when I was working with them they were VxWorks, but that was a few
years ago.  I expect they haven't changed much since a fellow researcher
who currently focuses on VoIP confirmed for me a few months ago that
they still suffer from the same DoS that I spoke about in my "VoIP
Attacks!" talk[1] at ToorCon 8 back in 2006.

[1]
http://www.dustintrammell.com/presentations/VoIP-Attacks-ToorCon-8/img53.html

-- 
Dustin D. Trammell
Security Researcher
BreakingPoint Systems, Inc.